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Cocoanut Birthday Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs, separated 1/2 cup milk 3/4 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract Red currant or raspberry jam Beat butter and sugar until creamy, add yolks of eggs, well beaten, milk, cocoanut, whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, flour sifted with baking powder, and add extract. Mix and bake in two layers. Cool and put together with Sugarless Cocoanut Frosting. Beat up one egg-white till stiff, and add two tablespoons honey or sirup and as much Dromedary Cocoanut as it will hold (about one-third of a cup). Spread the top of the cake with red jam and sprinkle over with cocoanut.
A plain butter cake stretched with shredded coconut, baked in two layers and finished with jam and an uncooked honey-and-coconut frosting. The method is compressed into one sentence and leaves out the oven entirely.
- Oven and pansNo temperature or time is given. Two 8- or 9-inch round layers bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the pan. Grease and flour the pans; the batter is stiff enough that it will stick otherwise.
- Fold the whites in lastThe instruction adds the beaten whites before the flour, which knocks a good deal of air out. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the milk and sifted flour alternately, stir in the coconut and extract, and fold the whites in at the end in two additions.
- The coconutDromedary shredded cocoanut was a moist packaged product, closer to today's flaked coconut than to dry desiccated; whether it was sweetened is not stated here. If you use unsweetened desiccated coconut it will drink liquid out of the crumb; soak it in a couple of tablespoons of the milk first, or add an extra tablespoon or two.
- Raw egg white in the frostingThe "sugarless" frosting is an uncooked white beaten with honey and coconut, never heated. Use pasteurized egg white, or substitute a cooked frosting, if it will be eaten by children, the elderly, or anyone pregnant or immune-compromised.
- Honey or sirup"Sirup" is simply the period spelling of syrup; corn syrup or cane syrup are the likely household options. Two tablespoons of liquid sweetener will not carry a stiff meringue far; expect a soft, sticky coconut paste rather than a spreadable icing, and use it as a filling between the layers as directed.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the heavy side by current practice. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder gives a better crumb and less risk of a chemical aftertaste.
- Butter and measuresHalf a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz. Flour was measured by scooping and levelling; 2 cups is roughly 240 g of all-purpose, and weighing it gives a more consistent result.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, 10 to 12 slices. Spread the top with red currant or raspberry jam only after the cake is fully cool, then scatter more coconut over while the jam is still tacky.
Dromedary was the grocery brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for packaged dates and for shredded coconut sold in tins and cartons at a time when the alternative was cracking and grating a whole nut. Booklets like this one existed to demonstrate how many places the product could go: coconut appears in the batter, in the filling and again over the top, three uses in a single cake. The spelling "cocoanut" was common in American cookbooks into the 1920s, usually attributed to the old confusion with cocoa. The "Sugarless Cocoanut Frosting" is the telling detail here, part of the wave of honey- and syrup-based substitutions that spread through American recipe writing around the First World War, when sugar supplies were restricted and conservation was urged as a patriotic duty -- though in the United States this worked largely through voluntary conservation and sugar certificates rather than formal rationing.