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Mock Angel Cake
One cup of flour, one cup of sugar, three teaspoons of baking powder, a pinch of salt. Put the ingredients together and sift four times; then add one cup of boiling milk, whites of two eggs beaten stiff; lemon extract.
— Miss Maude Hill
A one-bowl hot-milk sponge dressed up as angel food, and about as economical as cake gets. The original assumes you know what pan to use and how hot the oven should be, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: pour the milk in boilingThe scalding milk is what sets the crumb here, dissolving the sugar and gelatinizing the starch so a cake with no butter and only two whites still comes out tender. Have the dry mix sifted and waiting, then pour the milk straight from the heat and stir quickly.
- Fold the whites, do not beat them inAdd the stiff whites after the hot milk mixture has stopped steaming heavily, and fold rather than stir. The baking powder is doing most of the lifting, but the whites are what make the texture read as angel cake instead of plain cup cake.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is given. Bake at about 350F; hotter and the thin, sugary batter domes and cracks.
- Pan and timeAn 8-inch round or square pan, or a small ungreased tube pan if you want the angel-food look. Expect 25 to 30 minutes, until the top springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Lemon extractNo quantity is given. Half a teaspoon suits this size batter; a full teaspoon if you want it pronounced.
- Sifting four timesNot padding. Flour of this period was coarser and less evenly milled than ours, and repeated sifting was a dependable way to distribute the baking powder through it. With modern all-purpose flour, one thorough sift does much the same work.
- YieldA single thin layer, about eight small servings. It is best the day it is baked, and it takes a lemon glaze or a spoonful of preserves well since there is no fat to carry flavor.
Angel food cake ran on a dozen egg whites and a great deal of arm work, and community cookbooks filled up with "mock" versions that reached for the same white, airy crumb using baking powder and two or three whites instead. This one belongs to the hot-milk sponge family, a technique that spread widely in American home baking once chemical leavening was reliable and cheap, and which survives today in hot-milk cake and in many yellow sheet cakes. The title and the contributor's signature are the giveaway of the genre: a subscription cookbook assembled from named neighbors, where a cake that used two eggs rather than twelve was worth writing down.