Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Princess Cake
Princess Cake
Line small square cake tin with plain Crisco pastry. Sprinkle in 1/2 cup cleaned currants. Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar, then add 3 well beaten eggs, 3 cups flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Divide mixture into 2 portions. Add 1 tablespoon grated chocolate and 4 tablespoons milk to 1 portion. Put cake mixtures in spoonfuls on top of currants and bake in moderate oven for 35 minutes. Serve in square pieces.
A marbled cake baked over a pastry base, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The proportions are workable but the plain half of the batter is very stiff as written, so read the flour note before you start.
- CriscoStraight hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated to remove trans fats. Any solid all-vegetable shortening works; butter gives better flavour but a softer, less short pastry.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F (175C). Thirty-five minutes suits a small tin of roughly 8 inches square; the pastry base will need the full time to colour underneath, so bake on a lower rack or a preheated baking sheet.
- The flour is unbalancedThree cups of flour against 1/2 cup fat, 1 cup sugar and 3 eggs gives a paste, not a batter. Only the chocolate portion gets liquid (4 tablespoons milk). Add 3 to 4 tablespoons milk to the plain portion as well so the two spoon out at the same consistency and marble properly.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. "Cleaned" means picked over for stems and grit, then rinsed and dried; modern packaged currants need only a quick look-over.
- Grated chocolateMost likely grated unsweetened block chocolate. A tablespoon is a faint colour and flavour by current standards; two to three tablespoons of grated unsweetened chocolate, or a tablespoon of cocoa slackened in the milk, reads better.
- Lining with pastryRoll the pastry thin, line base and a little way up the sides, and dock it. It is not blind-baked, so keep it thin or the bottom stays pale and doughy under the wet batter.
- Spoonfuls on the currantsAlternate spoonfuls of plain and chocolate batter directly onto the fruit, then level lightly with an offset spatula. Do not swirl much or the marbling muddies.
- YieldA small square tin of about 8 inches gives roughly 9 to 12 squares. Cool completely in the tin before cutting or the pastry base shatters.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911; the recipes in it call for the product by name, which is why the fat here is specified as Crisco rather than butter or lard. The name "princess cake" seems to have been applied loosely in this period to plain butter or shortening cakes dressed up in some small way, in this case a pastry base, a layer of currants and a marbling of chocolate, and it has no direct connection to the Swedish prinsesstårta of green marzipan and cream. Building a cake batter on a lined pastry shell would have stretched the mixture and held the fruit off the tin, and let the whole thing be cut into neat squares for the tea table rather than served as a round cake.