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Cocoanut Snowball Cake
4 eggs, whites only 1 cup Dromedary 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter, creamed 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Cocoanut 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon baking soda Beat whites of eggs until stiff, gradually beat in sugar; remove beater, add butter, beating it in with a wooden spoon, add milk, vanilla, cocoanut and flour sifted with cream of tartar and soda. Mix carefully, turn into a greased and floured cake tin and bake in a moderate oven for one hour. Cover with the following frosting: Boil together one cup sugar and one-half cup milk until it forms a soft ball when tested in cold water, remove from fire, add one-half teaspoon vanilla extract and spread over cake. Sprinkle over with plenty of cocoanut.
A white butter cake leavened with cream of tartar and soda, iced with a boiled milk fondant and buried in coconut. Two points decide whether it works: how you handle the beaten whites, and how long you actually leave it in the oven.
- "1 cup Dromedary"Dromedary was a brand of packaged shredded coconut; the line simply means 1 cup of shredded coconut in the batter. The second, unmeasured "Cocoanut" in the list is for finishing the frosting — allow another cup or so.
- Moderate oven350F. The pan is unspecified; a greased and floured 9-inch round or an 8-inch square is the sensible reading.
- One hour is too longOne hour may be long for a shallow pan -- an hour at 350F suits a deep tube or loaf pan; if you bake it in a 9-inch round, start testing at 35 minutes, as the whites make this batter easy to dry out.
- Butter "creamed"The butter is softened and beaten smooth before it goes in, not melted. Working it into the meringue with a wooden spoon rather than a beater is deliberate — the point is to keep some of the air you just whipped in.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether they are a homemade single-acting baking powder, roughly equivalent to 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Because it reacts on contact with the liquid, mix carefully and get the batter into the oven promptly.
- The frosting is a milk fondantSugar and milk boiled to the soft-ball stage, 235-240F on a thermometer. It contains no egg white and will set firm as it cools, so spread it while still warm and fluid and sprinkle the coconut on at once, before a crust forms.
- YieldOn the assumption of a 9-inch layer, 8 to 10 servings; the recipe itself does not specify the tin. Doubling the batter for two layers is possible, but the recipe treats this frosting as a topping rather than a filling.
Coconut moved from a novelty to a pantry staple in American baking once shredded, dried coconut was sold in packages in the later nineteenth century — before that a cook grated the meat from a whole nut, and earlier cookbooks are often said to treat coconut cake as a special-occasion undertaking. Dromedary, a brand associated with the Hills Brothers Company of New York and better known today for dates, promoted the ingredient to buyers who might keep the package in the cupboard, and here it appears twice: once in the crumb and once on the outside. The "snowball" name is descriptive rather than technical — it belongs to a family of white cakes finished with white frosting and a heavy drift of coconut, the same impulse that produced snowdrift, silver and lady cakes, all of them showing off the whiteness that refined sugar, fine flour and egg whites alone made possible.