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Ten-Minute Cake
One-fourth pound butter, a little less than a pound flour, the same of sugar, six eggs beaten separately; flavor with mace and bake in muffin-rings. -Mrs. S. C. Lee, Baltimore, Md.
A pound-cake-family batter baked small and fast, with no leavening but beaten eggs. The name refers to the baking time, not the mixing.
- Weigh, don't scoopThe recipe is written in pounds because that is how cake was built in the 1870s. One pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; one pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups; 1/4 lb butter is one stick. Weighing gets you far closer to the intended batter than cup measures.
- The flour is the loose end"A little less than a pound" is vague, and the sugar, given only as "the same," inherits the same imprecision. With close to a pound each of flour and sugar, six eggs and only four ounces of butter there is very little liquid, so an overfull pound of flour gives a dry, crumbly cake. Hold back a few ounces and add only enough to make a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis is the hinge. The whites, whipped to soft peaks and folded in last, are the only leavening in the cake — there is no soda, no baking powder. Beat the yolks with the sugar and butter until pale and thick, then fold in whites and flour alternately, stopping the moment the flour disappears.
- Muffin ringsPlain metal rings set on a greased griddle or baking sheet, filled about two-thirds full. A standard 12-cup muffin tin does the same job; grease it well, since this batter is low in fat for its bulk.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. If the ten minutes of the title is the baking time, it implies a hot oven, probably somewhere in the 400 to 425F range; small cakes at that heat set fast and stay tender, while a slower oven will take considerably longer and risks drying them.
- MaceGround mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than nutmeg itself, and it was a standard cake spice in the period. Start with a scant teaspoon for a full batch; it is still sold ground, and freshly grated nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- YieldA full batch on these proportions makes roughly two dozen small cakes — more than most households want at once. Halving it is straightforward, using three eggs.
Cakes of this kind sit at the tail end of the English pound-cake tradition, where proportions were remembered as weights of butter, sugar, flour and eggs rather than as a list of steps; the whole method could be compressed into a single sentence because a competent cook was assumed to know what to do with it. Chemical leavening was available by the 1870s, but plenty of published cakes still relied entirely on separately beaten whites, and mace was a common cake flavoring of the period. Baking the batter in muffin rings rather than a loaf was a practical shortcut: small cakes bake in minutes, which is the claim of the title.