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Cushion Cake
Cream 1 cup Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar, add 2 well beaten eggs, and 1/2 cup milk. Sift 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and add to Crisco mixture, with 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Divide into 2 parts, add to 1 part 2 tablespoons molasses, 1 cup seeded raisins, 1/2 teaspoon cloves, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg. Bake in Criscoed and floured cake tin for 20 minutes. Take out of oven, spread white part on top, return to oven and bake until done.
A two-tone layer cake built in one tin: the spiced raisin half is part-baked first, then the plain half is spread over it and the whole thing finished together. The recipe comes from a Crisco advertising cookbook, which is why shortening appears in place of butter and even the greasing is done with it.
- The hinge: bake the dark layer only until setThe recipe gives no temperature, but twenty minutes in a moderate oven (around 350F) should leave the spiced half firm on top but not browned, so the pale batter can be spread over it without sinking or tearing. Spread quickly with an offset spatula and return it to the oven at once.
- Oven temperatureNone is given in the recipe; a moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern reading. Total time is likely to run somewhere in the region of 45 to 55 minutes; the cake is done when a skewer comes out of the pale top layer clean.
- CriscoThe shortening sold under the name today has been reformulated since this book, but it and other all-vegetable shortenings will serve here. Butter can be substituted cup for cup, but it browns faster and the crumb will be less tender. "Criscoed and floured" simply means greased and floured.
- The fat-to-sugar ratioOne cup of fat to half a cup of sugar is unusually rich and barely sweet by current taste. The molasses sweetens the dark half; if you want a dessert rather than a tea cake, three-quarters of a cup of sugar is defensible.
- Seeded raisinsAt the time this meant raisins with the seeds removed, often large Muscats. Ordinary seedless raisins are the equivalent; chop them if they are large so the layer slices cleanly.
- PanNo size is given. An 8-inch square tin or a 9-by-5 loaf pan suits this quantity; anything shallower will overflow once the second batter goes on.
- Yield and servingAbout nine squares or ten slices. It keeps two or three days wrapped, and the spice half improves overnight.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble and published in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911. The book's recipes are built around the product, and its instructions use "Crisco" as a verb — a small piece of branding embedded in the instructions themselves. The cake's name is often said to describe its construction rather than any regional tradition: a pale batter laid over a spiced, fruited one like a cushion over a seat. Marbled and two-tone cakes of this kind were common in turn-of-the-century American baking, where a bowl of batter might be split and half of it darkened with molasses, spice and raisins to make a single tin yield two apparent cakes.