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Valentine Cakes
2/3 cup Cottolene. 2 cups sugar. 4 eggs. 1 cup milk. 3¼ cups flour. 4½ teaspoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon rose water. 1/4 teaspoon mace. ½ teaspoon salt.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add gradually one cup sugar. Beat egg yolk thick and light, add gradually remaining cup sugar. Combine mixtures. Mix and sift flour, baking powder, mace and salt. Add alternately to first mixture with milk, add rose water. Then cut and fold in the stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Bake in small heart-shaped individual tins. Cover with frosting and outline the edge with tiny red candies. 2/3 cup Cottolene. 2 cups sugar. 2 eggs well beaten. 1 teaspoon soda. 1 cup buttermilk.
A plain white-and-yolk butter cake scaled down into individual hearts, from a book written to sell a brand of shortening. A few numbers in the printed text need judgment before you start.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, discontinued long ago. Substitute an equal measure of vegetable shortening, or 2/3 cup butter for better flavour — butter will give a slightly firmer, less tender crumb.
- The stray second listThe five items after "tiny red candies" (Cottolene, sugar, eggs, soda, buttermilk) appear to belong to a different cake and to have been carried over in the printing. Ignore them; the buttermilk-and-soda formula has no method attached and does not match the process above.
- The salt1½ teaspoons of salt against 3¼ cups of flour looks like a misprint for ½ teaspoon, which is nearer the proportion these cakes usually carry. I would use ½ teaspoon.
- Leavening4½ teaspoons of baking powder is high by modern standards — roughly 1 to 1¼ teaspoons per cup of flour is now standard, so about 3¼ to 4 teaspoons here; too much today gives a coarse crumb and a metallic edge.
- Eggs"Beat egg yolk" means all four yolks, beaten with the second cup of sugar until pale and thick. The whites go in last, folded, and should be beaten only to soft-firm peaks so they still fold cleanly into a fairly stiff batter.
- Rose water and maceBoth were common flavourings in American cakes into the 1910s and both are still sold. Use culinary rose water, not the cosmetic kind, and grate mace fresh if you can — pre-ground mace fades quickly and a teaspoon of stale powder tastes of nothing.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Small individual cakes of this richness want a moderate oven, 350F, for about 15 to 20 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- Tins and yieldThe batter runs to roughly six cups, so expect something like 18 to 24 small cakes depending on the size of your tins; a standard muffin tin works if you have no hearts.
- FinishingNo frosting recipe is given. A plain confectioners' sugar icing, thin enough to pour and set matte, holds the red candies best — a buttercream is too soft to keep an outlined edge.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening promoted from the 1890s as a cheaper and supposedly more wholesome alternative to lard. That commercial purpose explains why Cottolene heads nearly every list in the book, this one included. The cake itself is unremarkable for its date — a two-bowl white cake lifted with baking powder — but the flavouring is older than the book: rose water and mace were the standard perfume of English and colonial American cakes long before vanilla extract became cheap and universal, and their survival here in 1913 is a holdover rather than a novelty.