Puddings and pastry à la mode

Blanch and beat to a paste four ounces of sweet almonds and six bitter ones, adding a little rose-water to prevent oiling. Add a few lumps of loaf sugar which have been well rubbed on the rind of a lemon, a piece of butter the size of an egg, previously melted in a glassful of warm cream, five eggs well beaten, a glass of sherry, and a little grated nutmeg. Put the mixture into a buttered pie-dish or in buttered cups ; bake in a moderate oven for half an hour, ahd serve with sweet sauce. Almond Tartlets. Take half a pound of ground sweet almonds, pound them in a mortar with a little orange-flower water. Add half a pound of castor sugar, the grated rind of two lemons, and pound well together, then add half a pound of melted butter, the yolks of eight eggs, and the whites of four, well beaten to a paste. Put these into lined pattypans and bake. Amber Pudding. Boil one pint of milk with a little best Demarara sugar, and half the rind of a lemon. Beat up an egg with some custard powder, and two tablespoonfuls of milk ; pour this into the remainder of the milk, and when it is boiling stir it for several minutes ; put two tablespoonfuls of strawberry jam at the bottom of a pie-dish, and pour over it the custard mixture. This should be eaten cold. Apple Fancy. Pare some apples and take out the cores ; stew them with sugar and lemon peel ; beat up four eggs into a froth, add to them a cupful of grated bread-crumbs with a little sugar and nutmeg. Lay the stewed apples in the bottom of a dish and cover with the bread-crumbs, laying a few pieces of butter over the top. Bake it in a brisk oven, and turn it, when upside down, on a flat dish. Scatter powdered loaf-sugar over before serving. Apple Charlotte. Butter a plain tin mould ; cut slices of bread not quite a quarter of an inch thick, which should be dipped into oiled butter, scored across in diamond patterns, to put at bottom of mould ; cut some more slices the height of the mould, and the width of Savoy biscuits ; dip all these into oiled butter, and then arrange them neatly all round the mould, each one just overlapping the other. Make a puree with a dozen good apples by stirring them in only just enough water to cover them, beat them dry and add four ounces of castor sugar, and the rind of a grated lemon ; boil this for half an hour, stirring constantly, then pour it carefully into the mould, and let it bake for three-quarters of an hour, Apple Hedgehog. Peel and core three pounds of apples, without being divided, and stew in syrup till tender. Drain them then from the syrup, and fill them with apricot jam, and arrange them in layers in the shape of a hedgehog. Stew down three pounds more of the apples till smooth and dry, and fill up all the spaces between the whole apples with this ; beat the whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, with a tablespoonful of sugar, and spread it very evenly all over the apple, sift some castor sugar over, cut some sweet almonds (blanched of course) into strips, and stick them all over this, to give an appearance of hedgehog quills. Place it in a moderate oven till the almonds just change colour and the pudding is hot through ; custard sauce may be served round it. Apple Meringue.