Mudd House Victorian Christmas

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(12-12-2015 08:32 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Please help with this, too - what is a snowball cake and which are the historic sugar plums (respectively what are sugar plums at all)? And what are the colorful bits in front of the cake?

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PS: Mary would love her doll likeness!

Sorry that I missed these questions last night when the thread turned back to the Mudd House Christmas.

A Southern Snowball Cake is nothing but a large coconut cake, but many ladies of the house prided themselves in the quality of their recipes for it. It was traditionally three layers of tasty, yellow cake frosted with a boiled, white icing, and the freshly shaved coconut meat was sprinkled on the cake as the icing cooled. A good Southerner would never mix the coconut in with the icing!

Some bakers would also shave the layers once piled on each other , but before icing, in order to achieve as much of a ball shape as possible. There's a recipe for such a cake in the booklet I'm sending.

The dishes around the cake are filled with candies that date back to the Civil War era: hard candies mainly, like raspberry balls, peanut brittle, ribbon candy, hard candy sticks. We have decorated around the cake with ivy and silk roses.

Roses are a symbol of the Virgin Mary, so Victorians used fabric roses from millinery stores or fashioned roses out of crepe paper and used them for Christmas decorations. We have a boxwood tree on the hall table that is decorated with such roses, sprigs of baby's breath, little red bows, and mercury glass balls.

As for the sugar plums, we found out that that is now considered an obsolete term. Some sources refer to them as "comfits." There is no fruit in a sugar plum, so scratch that idea. The "antique" sugar plum was layer upon layer of sugar coating around a middle of seed or nut. Caraway and Cardamon seeds were often used as well as almonds. Today's Jordan almonds might come close to being the sugar plums of today. Jelly beans and jawbreakers are sort of the same idea.

The "plum" probably referred to the size and shape of the confection. However, "plum" is also a slang word for something good, such as a prize or a "plum assignment."