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Ginger Cup Cake
Mix two cupfuls of sifted sugar with two cupfuls of butter, melted, but not oiled. Add three well-beaten eggs, a cupful of treacle, four heaped cupfuls of flour, a heaped table-spoonful of ground ginger, a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda, and a cupful of new milk. When thoroughly and smoothly mixed, pour into a buttered mould, and bake in a moderate oven. If preferred, the mixture may be baked in patty-pans. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour in small pans, an hour and a half in a mould. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. for this quantity. Sufficient for a three-pint mould.
A treacle gingerbread in cake form, measured entirely by the cup — unusual for a British book of this date, and the source of most of its ambiguity. Read the notes on tin size before you scale anything.
- "Cup cake" means measured in cupsThe name refers to the method of measuring, not to individual small cakes. The recipe offers patty-pans as an option, which is the closest it comes to what we would call a cupcake.
- The cup itselfTreat a cupful as 8 fl oz / about 240 ml. Weights follow from that: 2 cups sugar is about 14 oz, 2 cups melted butter about 1 lb, 4 heaped cups flour roughly 1 lb 4 oz. The book does not define its cup, and an imperial half-pint measure (10 fl oz) would push every quantity up by a quarter.
- Ingredient namesCarbonate of soda is baking soda. New milk is fresh whole milk, nothing more. Treacle here means dark cane treacle or molasses — not golden syrup, and not blackstrap, which is too bitter for a full cupful.
- "Melted, but not oiled"Butter should be just liquid and barely warm. Once it separates and goes oily-hot it will scramble the eggs and the crumb turns greasy. Let it cool to blood heat before the eggs go in.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at around 325-350F / 165-175C. Molasses batters colour fast, so tent the top with foil once it is browned; the cake is not done until a skewer comes out clean.
- The stated tin will overflowThe mixed batter comes to appreciably more than three pints, likely nearer three and a half to four. Use a larger tin -- a 9-inch tube or bundt tin, or two 2 lb loaf tins -- and fill no more than two-thirds.
- TimingAn hour and a half at 350°F suits a large deep mould in a coal range; in a modern oven start checking a 9-inch tube cake at 55 minutes and loaves at 45. Fifteen minutes for patty-pans is about right.
- Texture to expectOne teaspoon of soda against four cups of flour and a cup of treacle gives a close, moist, distinctly heavy crumb rather than a light sponge. That is the intended result; adding more raising agent gives it a soapy edge.
- YieldAbout 20 servings from a large tube tin, or roughly 30 patty-pan cakes. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
Measuring by cupfuls rather than by the pound was an American habit that spread through nineteenth-century printed cookery, and the "cup cake" — so called because the whole formula was counted out in cups, as in the 1-2-3-4 cake — is one of its clearest fingerprints. The "Probable cost / Sufficient for" format points to Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, an English household dictionary, though the page itself does not settle the attribution or the date firmly; it suggests how freely recipes crossed the Atlantic in print. The dish underneath is thoroughly British, though: treacle and ground ginger together are the backbone of the whole gingerbread family, parkin among them, and both were cheap by this period, molasses arriving as a by-product of cane sugar refining and ginger long since a staple of the colonial grocery trade rather than a luxury spice. The costing of 1s. 8d. is a reminder of the book's audience: a mistress checking what a cake ought to cost her before the cook was given the order.