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Golden Orange Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful orange extract 1 cupful milk 5 eggs or yolks of 10 eggs 4 cupfuls flour 1 cupful Crisco 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder Orange icing For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add salt, eggs well beaten, orange extract, and flour and baking powder alternately with milk. Mix carefully and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven about one hour. This mixture may be baked in layers.
For icing. Boil 1 cupful water with 2 cupfuls sugar till it forms soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240 degree F., then pour over well beaten yolks of four eggs, beat until smooth and thick, add 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls orange extract and spread at once on cake.
Sufficient for one large cake.
Gold Cake (Kate B. Vaughn) 3/4 cupful sugar 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful milk 4 yolks of eggs 1 1/2 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract Cream Crisco and sugar together. Beat egg yolks very light and add to creamed mixture. Add dry ingredients, milk, and lemon extract and mix well. Turn into a small Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes.
Sufficient for one small cake.
Two related gold cakes — cakes built on yolks alone, the companion to the whites-only white cake. The instructions are terse in the way Crisco's own booklets always were, so a few numbers need filling in.
- Crisco means solid shorteningMeasure it as a solid, packed into the cup or spooned and leveled, not melted. Modern shortening has been reformulated to cut trans fats, but it behaves much the same in creaming; unsalted butter can be substituted, though the crumb will be a little less tender.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. A cake of this size in one large tin will want the full hour the recipe gives; layers from the same batter will bake much faster, on the order of 25 to 30 minutes.
- Pan sizeFour cups of flour and five eggs is a large batter. Use a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch rounds plus a small extra layer; a single 9x13 will also take it. "Criscoed and floured" is simply greased and floured.
- Five eggs or ten yolksThe all-yolk version is the point of a gold cake: richer, deeper colored, denser. It exists because so many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cakes called for whites only, leaving yolks to be used up. Ten yolks is roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup.
- Orange flavorThe cake leans entirely on bottled extract. If you want more of the flavor the name promises, add the finely grated zest of one orange along with the extract, working it into the creamed sugar so its oils release.
- The icing is a cooked-syrup yolk frostingBoil the syrup to the 240F the recipe names; much below that it will not thicken, and much above it sets too stiff to spread. Pour it into the yolks in a thin stream while beating constantly, or the yolks will scramble. It sets fast, hence "spread at once."
- Eggs in the icingThe hot syrup cooks the yolks only partly. If the cake is for anyone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized yolks.
- YieldThe large cake serves 12 to 16. The smaller Gold Cake, at 1 1/2 cups flour, fills one 8-inch round and serves 8; three teaspoons baking powder to that much flour is generous by modern standards, and two will do.
The recipe was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had been introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening; that is why every recipe specifies the brand by name and why tins are "Criscoed" rather than greased. One of the recipes is attributed parenthetically to "Kate B. Vaughn," which suggests a contributed recipe. Gold cake and its twin, silver or white cake, were a matched pair in American home baking — one used the yolks, the other the whites, so nothing was wasted when a household broke a dozen eggs.