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Boiling Water Cake
3 eggs (well beaten) 1 cup sugar 1 cup Five Roses flour 3 teaspoons (small) baking powder 4 tablespoons boiling water.
Have oven at good baking heat and water boiling before starting to make this cake, as it must be made quickly. Pans should be oiled ready to receive it. It will be found good either as a layer, plain, or roll jelly cake. Beat eggs well, and beat in the sugar. Have ready the flour with the baking powder sifted in. Add 4 tablespoons boiling water to eggs and sugar, stirring constantly. Add the flour, beat well and bake at once from 10 to 15 minutes, according to heat of oven and size of baking pan. The thinner it is spread, the shorter time it takes to bake.
Handy when milk is scarce. 12 eggs
A fat-free hot-water sponge, built on air beaten into whole eggs rather than butter or milk. Speed is the whole method: the batter has no chemical staying power once the boiling water hits it.
- Work fast, as instructedThis is the hinge. The boiling water partly sets the egg foam and jump-starts the baking powder, so the batter must reach an already-hot oven within a minute or two of mixing. Have pans oiled and lined and the oven fully preheated before you crack an egg.
- "Good baking heat"The book gives no temperature; for a thin sponge layer or a jelly roll, something in the range of 375-400F is a reasonable modern equivalent. At 10 to 15 minutes the cake is done when it springs back and the edges just pull from the pan; overbaking is what makes this style dry and impossible to roll.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose works; for a more tender crumb replace 2 tablespoons of the cup with cornstarch. Measure by spooning and levelling, not scooping, or the cake will be tough.
- "3 teaspoons (small)"The recipe's own "(small)" signals a spoon smaller than the modern 5 mL measure. About 1 1/2 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder is enough for one cup of flour; three level modern teaspoons would likely taste metallic.
- Beating the eggs"Well beaten" here means a stand mixer's worth of work: whole eggs and sugar whipped pale, thick, and ribbon-forming, five to eight minutes. There is no butter and no milk, so all the lift and all the tenderness come from that foam.
- Tablespoons of waterFour tablespoons is a quarter cup. Add it in a thin stream while the mixer runs so the eggs are not scrambled by contact with the boiling water.
- The stray "12 eggs"This trailing figure is not part of this recipe's ingredient list; it appears to be stray text carried over from the original page. Use three eggs.
- Yield and servingEnough for one 9-inch layer, a 10 x 15-inch jelly-roll sheet, or eight small squares. If rolling, turn the hot sheet onto a sugared towel, roll it up loosely at once, and unroll to fill when barely warm. The cake stales quickly, so eat it the day it is made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great early twentieth-century Canadian flour promotions: recipes gathered from home cooks across the country and printed to sell the brand, distributed in enormous numbers and long a fixture in prairie and Maritime kitchens. Hot-water sponge cakes like this one belong to a family of "water cakes" that stretch back into nineteenth-century baking, made without butter or milk and depending entirely on well-beaten eggs; boiling water was the trick that gave a fat-free batter a moist crumb. The closing note, "handy when milk is scarce," is the reason for its place in the book. Fresh dairy was seasonal and perishable for many households, so a decent cake requiring nothing but eggs, sugar and flour earned its page.