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Cream Cake
3/4 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 1/2 pints flour, 5 eggs, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder, 1 cupful milk. Rub the butter and sugar to a white, light cream. Add the eggs, two at a time, beating five minutes after each addition. Sift the flour with the powder, which add to the butter, etc., and the milk. Mix into rather thin batter, and bake in jelly-cake tins, well greased, in hot oven fifteen minutes. When cold spread pastry cream between the layers, and ice the top with clear icing.
A rich, egg-leavened layer cake of the late nineteenth-century American type, filled with pastry cream and finished with a thin poured icing. The measurements are workable once translated, but the leavening and the oven both need interpreting.
- Flour by the pintA pint measure of flour is 2 cupfuls, so 1 1/2 pints is 3 cups, roughly 12 1/2 oz or 355 g of all-purpose flour. Spoon and level rather than scooping, since a packed cup will push this well past what the batter can carry.
- Butter and sugar3/4 cupful of butter is 1 1/2 sticks, 6 oz or 170 g; 2 cupfuls of sugar is about 14 oz or 400 g. Have the butter at cool room temperature so it will actually cream to the "white, light" stage described.
- The eggs do most of the liftingOne teaspoonful of baking powder for 3 cups of flour is far less than a modern layer cake would use, which suggests the five eggs, beaten in hard, were expected to supply much of the lift; the long beating is probably not padding, and stopping short risks a dense cake. With a stand mixer, 1 to 2 minutes on medium-high after each addition should do the work of the specified five by hand.
- Five eggs, two at a timeAdd them in pairs and finish with the odd egg on its own, beating as thoroughly after the last as after the others.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in books of this period is 400–425F (200–220C). For thin layers 400F is the safer reading; check at 12 minutes, since 15 is the outer limit for a shallow layer.
- Jelly-cake tinsThese are shallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across and about an inch deep. This quantity of batter should fill roughly three 9-inch pans or four 8-inch ones. Grease well; lining the bases with parchment makes release easier.
- Pastry cream and clear icing"Pastry cream" is crème pâtissière — milk, sugar, egg yolks and flour or cornstarch, cooked to a thick custard and cooled completely before it goes near the cake. "Clear icing" most likely means a plain water or milk glacé icing of confectioners' sugar, poured thin over the top, rather than a buttercream.
- Assembly and yieldBoth cake and filling must be fully cold or the cream will run out at the edges. Three 9-inch layers give 12 to 16 slices; because of the custard filling, keep the finished cake refrigerated and eat it within two days.
"Cream cake" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks often means not a cake made with cream but a cake filled with a cooked custard, close to what was also sold as Boston cream pie or a cream layer cake. The form went together with two developments: chemical leavening, which made a reliable light layer easier to achieve, and the shallow tin pan sold as a "jelly-cake tin," which allowed a batter to be baked as three or four thin discs and stacked with filling. The heavy egg count here sits closer to the older pound-cake tradition than to a modern layer cake, and the single teaspoon of baking powder suggests a cook relying on eggs first.