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Spanish Layer Cake
1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup sugar.
Yolks 2 eggs. 1/2 cup milk. 1⅞ cups pastry flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. 1/4 teaspoon cloves. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Whites 2 eggs.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Mix and sift flour, baking powder, spices and salt; add to first mixture alternately with milk. Cut and fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Bake in two well-greased, square, layer cake pans. Spread with a thick layer of raspberry between layers. Cover top with frosting or dredge with powdered sugar.
Fifth Sunday
A plain spiced butter-style layer cake from a book that never states an oven temperature, since its readers judged heat by hand and by habit. Two things need translating: the fat and the missing baking directions.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which sponsored this book. Substitute the same volume of vegetable shortening, or 1/2 cup (113 g) unsalted butter for better flavour, creaming it exactly as directed.
- 1 7/8 cups pastry flourThat is 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons, somewhere around 200-215 g depending on how the flour is scooped. Pastry flour is softer than all-purpose; if you have none, measure out 1 7/8 cups all-purpose, remove about 3 1/2 tablespoons and replace it with the same volume of cornstarch.
- Oven heatNone is given. 350F is a safe working temperature for a cake of this kind; watch it rather than trusting a fixed time.
- Pans and timingTwo square layer pans, probably 8-inch, greased and preferably lined on the bottom. If the layers are shallow, expect roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the edges have pulled from the sides.
- "A thick layer of raspberry"Raspberry jam or preserves is meant, not fresh fruit. Warm and stir it briefly so it spreads without tearing the crumb, and let the layers cool completely first.
- Folding the whitesThe baking powder does most of the lifting here, but the two beaten whites are what keep the crumb light against a fairly heavy 1/2 cup of fat. Fold in three additions and stop as soon as no white streaks remain.
- SpicesA teaspoon of cinnamon with a quarter teaspoon of cloves is assertive by modern standards for a two-egg cake. It is deliberate, and it is the whole character of the cake, but ground cloves fade with age and old jars can taste flat.
- YieldTwo square layers, serving about nine to twelve. The 'Fifth Sunday' tag places it as the sweet for a Sunday dinner, not a celebration cake.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, which is why that shortening appears in nearly every recipe in the book; the whole volume is essentially an extended advertisement organised as a year of menus. "Spanish" attached to a cake in American cookbooks of this era rarely signals anything genuinely Iberian. It generally marks a cake spiced with cinnamon and cloves, sometimes darkened with brown sugar or chocolate, the name working as a shorthand for warm spice much as "Spanish bun" had done in earlier English and American baking. Cottonseed oil shortenings like Cottolene were themselves a recent arrival, promoted from the 1890s onward as a cheaper and more consistent substitute for lard, and cookbooks issued by their manufacturers did a great deal to normalise them in home baking before Crisco overtook the field.