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ah seasons greetings
as we're in the middle of the festive
season things are a little busy with all
the entertaining
i like to have a few things in the store
cupboard that i can turn into dishes for
dinner to make life a little easier
should there be unexpected guests
today i'm making gertrude alacreme from
one of my favorite recipe books written
by eliza acton
for this recipe you will need
slightly stale sponge cake
eggs
sugar
cream a selection of preserves
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crystallized fruit and flowers
almond paste
and food coloring
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this recipe is one of many i have for
using up stale sponge cakes
i always make a second sponge cake
whenever i make one
i'm going to slice
the cake horizontally with equal slices
and then for each slice i'll just cut
out the center
then spread different colored jams over
each slice it's an ideal way of using up
some of the half jars in the back of the
cupboard
i have
blackberry
lime and lemon
strawberry and apricot
then once i've spread them i'll stack it
back up again
this time of year is really very busy
and there's only four of us so we have
to be more organized than usual
after all we don't just make
breakfast luncheon
dinner and supper for lord lady
braybrook and their guests
but also four meals for just under 30
indoor servants
and the upper servants and the lower
servants have different meals
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i'll keep these bits perhaps for a
trifle
so
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we often buy confectionery and fancy
cakes and such like in
and we rarely bake our own bread
there are several women locally
that i use to do the rougher work
leaving my maids to work here in the
kitchen
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so
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and now i'm going to cover the whole
thing in icing
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this is quite an old-fashioned way to
not iso cake it's not quite royal icing
and not quite meringue
i'm going to whisk my egg whites until
they're stiff
and then add some sugar
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i'm now going to ice my cake
this cake has a curious name gertrude
i think it was probably supposed to be
gurland which means garland in french
i understand eliza acton spent some time
in france
but she calls it gertrude
and so shall i
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do
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now you don't need to worry too much
about your icing
you can cover up mistakes
by adding some decoration
i'm now going to put the cake
into a very slow oven
to let it dry out
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i've already started decorating my cake
using some candied fruit
but while it was drying i made some leaf
shapes
out of some almond paste which i mixed
with food coloring
and then rolled it out and used my
cutters you can get many different
shapes of cutters nowadays
i'm going to stick the shapes on
using some royal icing
synthetic food colorings like this have
been around for about 10 years now
i think they come from the coal industry
there were even some when i was training
i remember us being very excited when
move arrived
i still insist that the girls learn how
to make food colouring in the old
traditional way the spinach for green
carrots for orange
but they aren't as good
they're a bit watery
and leave a taste
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and now all i need to do is to fill the
center
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i'm filling the center of the cake or
garland with whipped cream
you must make sure you get right down to
the bottom
and i'm going to finish the decoration
with some sugared flowers
and some more leaves
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there you are
gertrude alecrem
happy christmas
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[Applause]
do
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you