Home › Supper › Cocoanut Custard Cake
Cocoanut Custard Cake
One coffee cup of sugar, a piece of butter the size of an egg, the whites of three well beaten eggs, one-half teaspoon soda dissolved in one tablespoon of hot water, one wine glass of milk, one coffee cup flour, one teaspoon cream tartar, sifted with the flour; bake in jelly cake tins.
A plain white layer cake leavened the pre-baking-powder way, with the coconut custard left entirely to the cook's judgment. The measurements are all household vessels rather than standard cups.
- Coffee cupIn American receipt books of this period a coffee cup is taken as roughly one standard cup, 8 fl oz, though the actual cups varied. Use 1 cup sugar and 1 cup flour and expect a small, sweet batter.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Have it soft enough to cream with the sugar.
- Wine glass of milkA wine glass is conventionally 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. That is a genuinely small amount of liquid for a cup of flour; the batter will be stiff until the beaten whites go in.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder made in the bowl. The soda goes in dissolved in hot water and the cream of tartar is sifted dry with the flour so they only meet in the batter. Get the tins into the oven promptly once combined, as the lift begins at once.
- Beaten whitesBeat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last. They are the structure of the cake as much as the leavening is.
- Jelly cake tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches. This quantity fills two thin layers. Bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the top springs back.
- The missing custardThe page gives the cake and not the filling. A coconut custard along period lines would be milk thickened with the three leftover yolks, sugar and a little cornstarch, cooked to a boil, then grated coconut stirred in and the whole cooled before spreading. Cook the yolks through and refrigerate any assembled cake.
- CoconutA cook of this period would most likely have grated a whole fresh nut, though packaged grated coconut was also sold by the later decades. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flake will push an already sweet cake further.
- YieldTwo thin layers, eight modest slices.
Layer cakes filled with a boiled custard belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when cheap flat tinware and chemical leavening made thin, quick-baking layers practical for home bakers. Soda with cream of tartar was a common household leavening, and recipes went on specifying the two separately after tinned baking powder was widely available on shop shelves. Coconut reached northern American kitchens as whole nuts shipped from the Caribbean, and grating one was laborious enough that a coconut cake read as special occasion baking; the trade in packaged shredded coconut in the closing decades of the century is what moved it toward everyday baking.