KP+: Rhubarb & Custard Fancy Cake
Fluffy Sponge! Custard! Rhubarb! Yorkshire vs. Detroit?!?! Let's go!
Rhubarb and Custard Fancy Cake
If you grew up in the UK, you’ll be immediately familiar with the name Mr Kipling, arbiter of “Exceedingly Good Cakes”. But just like Betty Crocker and Captain Birdseye, Mr Kipling is not a person nor a baker; he is a figment of a marketing team’s imagination.
Back in 1967, the Rank Hovis McDougall conglomerate, which produced the eponymous Hovis bread, Bisto Gravy, Saxa Salt and Atora Suet, among other products, decided to launch a new product line focused on mass-produced cakes to help its flour business expand. RHM appointed ad agency JWT, the brains behind ‘snap, crackle and pop’ and the Andrex puppy, to come up with the marketing vision for the new brand.
With research led by Judie Lannon, JWT discovered that, since men were considered better bakers by the general public, it would be a safer bet to go with a masculine-sounding name and decided on ‘Kipling’. Copywriter Lleweleyn Thomas, son of poet Dylan Thomas, who was working at the ad agency at the time, added the ‘mister’ – not exactly ‘Under Milk Wood’ levels of artistry, but definitely compelling.
In the series of adverts which followed, the devoted Mr Kipling was never seen or even heard - he was too busy making cakes, of course. What cakes? For the brand’s launch, some 20 cakes were released to tempt people away from their local bakeries and toward Mr Kipling instead. These included Jaffa Fingers, Treacle Lattice Tarts, Manor Cakes and a whole host of ‘products’ that have since been discontinued, though some have remained steadfast and are still produced by Mr Kipling (now owned by Premier Foods, RIP RHM) and his Stoke-on-Trent megafactory today. Among the 1 billion (!) cakes produced by the factory are Cherry Bakewells, Viennese Whirls, Angel Slices and, of course, French Fancies.
The Mr Kipling French Fancies are no doubt a take on Fondant Fancies, a bake created some 50 years before at the famous Betty’s Tea Rooms in Harrogate. In contrast to the fictitious Mr Kipling, the Fondant Fancy was created by the very real Frederick Belmont, founder of Bettys (maybe in the 1920s, when it was founded, the sentiment was that women made better bakers than men?!), whose selection of miniature tea-time treats is still produced at the bakery today.
The format is this: Sponge Cake sandwiched with jam and buttercream, topped with marzipan, then coated in fondant icing. The Mr Kipling version, probably for production purposes, opted for a dome of buttercream on top, rather than in the middle, which seems to be the standard for mass-produced versions now. I will admit, I love the way that button looks.
Lately, I’ve seen a resurgence of fondant fancies; Sophie Bamford (All Day Cake) wrote a recipe for blackcurrant versions last year, TOAD bakery made a selection for Valentine’s Day, and Richard Hart has developed a version for the signature menu at Claridge’s Bakery. And they all look gorgeous.
I’ve wanted to give them a go for a while, but I can’t lie to you; I can’t imagine anything worse than dipping individual cakes in icing. I LOVE faff, but that… for some reason… is simply a faff too far for me.
For the last few months, I have been working on a big project, and one part of that is coming up with a long laundry list of things I’d like to bake. One of the recipes on my list was ‘fondant fancy tray bake’. I wasn’t exactly sure what this would look like, but I decided to take a run at it this week. Then, as luck would have it, I saw that Anna Ansari - author of the brilliant Silk Roads - had written about a unique Detroit cake, Bumpy Cake, a devil’s food cake topped with ‘bumps’ of buttercream and chocolate ganache.
MY PATH WAS SUDDENLY CLEAR. I never thought I’d be mashing up a Yorkshire tea room / Mr Kipling with a Detroit classic, but here we are. I shall name it: Fancy Cake.
The Fillings
I think you could really put any sort of jam or buttercream in this recipe, but because it’s March and I’m in the UK, there was really only one option for today: Rhubarb and Custard, obvs!
For this recipe, I make one batch of pastry cream and divide it roughly in half. I fold whipped cream into the first half, then beat soft butter into the second half. This guarantees a super-soft, creamy filling in the middle and a firm, pipeable bump on top. The cream is intentionally barely sweetened, since the icing does more than enough of that.
I’ve gone for a thickened rhubarb compote for the middle, though you could really use any jam. The compote is the same as the recipe from this previous edition of the newsletter, except I’ve gone for the 1.5x amount of cornflour to give it some staying power. You could really use any jam if you don’t feel like searching for rhubarb or faffing with compote. I have to admit the fluffy cake looks pretty gorgeous just with some custard and compote on top, so you could, by all means, finish the decorating here!
I also have included an optional syrup — it is nice to further soak the sponge, but it isn’t make-or-break for this cake.
The finishing
While less faffy than coating individual cakes, it is still a bit of a challenge to get the finish with the icing. I often find getting the texture of the icing right quite hard - you want it to pour out easily but be thick enough to slightly grip onto the cake whilst still flowing for that flawless look. I start with a 1:5 juice-to-sugar ratio. The best way to check whether it pours well is to… give it a go! If you are worried about pouring directly onto your cake, you can flow a little onto a plate and see how it behaves. I’ve included GIFs below, which I hope are helpful. To be honest, like with most things in baking, confidence is key. If you don’t feel like juicing rhubarb, then you could use lemon juice for both layers and make use of food colouring to great effect.
Alright, let’s make it!