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Love Cake
One cup sugar, three tablespoons melted butter, three tablespoons sweet milk, three eggs, one and one-fourth cups flour sifted with one and one-half teaspoons baking powder.
Filling-Two-thirds of a cup of rich cream, three tablespoons of powdered sugar; whip together until very light and thick, and spread between layers.
— Mrs. George W. Loud
A small two-layer sponge-type cake with a whipped cream filling, written in the compressed style of a community cookbook: no pan size, no oven temperature, no baking time. The proportions are sound, but you supply the missing half.
- No oven temperature given350F is a reasonable modern default for a cake of this size and richness. A hotter oven risks doming and cracking before the center sets.
- Pans and timingThe recipe names neither. Two 8-inch round pans, greased and floured, will work, though the batter is small and the layers will be thin. Start checking at about 18 minutes, and bake until the top springs back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh milk. The term distinguished it from sour or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus or soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk suits the small quantity here.
- Method the recipe assumesBeat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick, then add the melted butter and milk, then fold in the sifted flour and baking powder. The baking powder does much of the lifting, but the beaten eggs contribute too, so do not deflate them.
- Rich creamHeavy or whipping cream, 36 percent fat or better. "Rich cream" was not a standardized term. Stop whipping while it still holds a soft peak, or it will turn grainy.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which helps stabilize the filling; in period usage the term could also mean finely ground granulated sugar. Three tablespoons to two-thirds cup cream makes a distinctly sweetened filling.
- The filling is perishableUnlike a buttercream, whipped cream between layers weeps within a few hours. Fill the cake shortly before serving and keep it refrigerated; it does not travel or sit out.
- YieldIf baked in two 8-inch pans, a two-layer cake giving roughly eight to ten small slices. It is a plain, low cake by modern standards, not a tall celebration layer cake.
The recipe belongs squarely to the era of chemical leavening: baking powder became widely available and cheap in American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it allowed a household cook to produce a layer cake without hours of hand-beating or a yeast sponge. Its appearance over a contributor's married name is typical of the church and community cookbook, a genre in which recipes circulated as personal signatures, assumed a shared knowledge of ovens and beating, and recorded only what a neighbor would not already know.