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Electric Cake
Sift 1 pound of flour in bowl; add 1 1/4 cupfuls yeast (1 1/4 cakes of compressed yeast), a tablespoonful of molasses, and 1/4 cupful of warm water. Add these to the flour, working into a dough. Let rise three hours. Cream 1 pound of butter with 1 pound pulverized sugar; add 1/2 cupful milk. Beat 7 eggs light; add these to batter; sugar; mix alternately with 3/4 of a pound of flour. Beat light, then add 1 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoonful of ground mace, and half nutmeg, grated.
When the dough is light add it-to the cake batter; turn into a greased tin. Bake one hour in moderate oven.
This is a yeast-raised butter cake in the old German Gugelhupf mould rather than anything resembling a griddle cake: a sponge of flour and yeast is set to rise, then folded into a creamed pound-cake batter. The hinge is that the risen dough must be light and active when it goes in, and the loaded batter still needs time in the tin before it meets the oven.
- A pound of flourWeigh it rather than measure: 1 lb is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups of modern all-purpose flour, and the second addition of 3/4 lb is roughly 2 3/4 cups. Plain soft or all-purpose flour is right here; bread flour will fight the butter.
- The yeast is ambiguous"1 1/4 cupfuls yeast" means liquid home-brewed or brewer's yeast, which is mostly water; "1 1/4 cakes of compressed yeast" is roughly 3/4 oz of fresh cake yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant dry. The two are not interchangeable in volume, so if you use compressed or dry yeast the sponge will need considerably more liquid than the 1/4 cup of warm water given.
- Pulverized sugarThat is finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Ordinary caster or granulated sugar creams correctly with the butter.
- Moderate oven350F. With this much butter and sugar in one deep tin, 325F is the safer reading of "moderate" for a full hour; test with a skewer at 55 minutes and expect it may want longer.
- The tinA pound of butter, a pound of sugar, seven eggs and nearly two pounds of flour is close to six pounds of batter. Use a large tube or bundt pan of 12 cups or more, or split between two 9-inch loaf tins; a single ordinary cake pan will overflow.
- A second rise, unstatedThe recipe says to turn it into the tin and bake, but a yeast batter this heavy needs 45 to 60 minutes in the warm tin until visibly puffed before baking. Going straight to the oven gives a dense, damp crumb.
- Half a nutmegGrated, that is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons. Mace and nutmeg come from the same fruit and their flavours overlap.
- YieldSixteen to twenty generous slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days.
Yeast-leavened butter cakes of this kind were common in American household baking through the nineteenth century, with counterparts in the German Gugelhupf and Butterkuchen traditions and in older English barm-raised cakes; the sponge-and-batter method here, in which a risen dough is folded into a creamed mixture, is the older technique that chemical leavening gradually displaced. Whimsical cake names were common in compiled recipe books of the period, and "Electric" was a fashionable modifier around the turn of the century, attached to everything from soap to bitters at a time when electrification was the emblem of the new and quick; no documented origin for this particular name survives, and the connection is generally assumed rather than established. The compressed yeast cake mentioned as an alternative was itself a comparatively recent convenience, sold by the cake and steadily replacing the liquid barm that earlier cooks kept going at home.