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Cocoanut Cup Cakes
2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg, beaten 1 cup sour cream 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon baking soda Beat butter and sugar together, add egg, cream, vanilla, cocoanut and flour sifted with soda. Mix well, and divide into twelve greased and floured cake tins and bake in a moderately hot oven for 20 minutes. Cool and cover with Boiled Cocoanut Frosting. Pour two-thirds cup milk into a saucepan, add two cups sirup or honey, a pinch of salt and two teaspoons of butter. Boil until a soft ball can be tested in cold water or 240° F. on candy thermometer, add one-half cup Dromedary Cocoanut and beat until creamy. Spread on cakes and sprinkle thickly with cocoanut.
A plain sour-cream cup cake carrying a boiled coconut icing, from a promotional booklet for Dromedary brand shredded coconut. Two things in the printed text need sorting out before you start.
- The vanilla is a typo"11½ teaspoons" is a broken line of type; the intended quantity is almost certainly 1½ teaspoons. Anything near eleven would be inedible.
- Cup cakes means small tins"Twelve greased and floured cake tins" is a twelve-cup muffin pan or twelve individual tinware cups, not twelve layer pans. The recipe assumes greasing and flouring rather than liners.
- Moderately hot ovenConventionally around 375-400°F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a filled two-thirds muffin cup; test with a straw or skewer.
- Sour cream and sodaThe single teaspoon of soda is the only leavening and depends on the acid in the cream. Use full-fat cultured sour cream, not a low-fat or sweetened version, and get the batter into the oven promptly once the two meet.
- Dromedary CocoanutA moist, sweetened shredded coconut sold in cans and packets. Modern sweetened flaked coconut from a bag is the closest match. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier and will make a noticeably less tender crumb.
- The frosting is a candy, not a buttercreamTwo cups of syrup or honey with two-thirds cup milk boiled to 240°F gives a soft-ball fondant-type icing. It sets fast once you stop beating, so have the cooled cakes lined up and spread quickly.
- Syrup or honey"Sirup" here means light corn syrup or cane syrup. Honey will boil to the same stage but browns more and carries a strong flavor of its own into a coconut icing.
- YieldTwelve cakes. The frosting quantity is generous for twelve and will comfortably cover them with enough left to be thick on top.
Dromedary was a brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known through the first half of the twentieth century for packaged dates, shredded coconut and candied fruit, and the little recipe books it distributed existed to find household uses for those cans. Shredded coconut became a staple of American home baking only after processors worked out how to keep the meat moist and shelf-stable in sealed tins in the late nineteenth century; before that, a cook wanting coconut cake had to crack and grate the nut herself. The spelling "cocoanut" competed with "coconut" in American print well into the twentieth century, and is often said to reflect a confusion with cocoa. The cakes themselves are unremarkable sour-cream cup cakes, which is the point: the booklet's job was to show that a can of coconut belonged in cakes you already knew how to make.