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Bridegroom's Cake
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup sweet milk 3 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon vanilla 3 drops lemon extract 4 eggs ½ pound blanched almonds (shredded) ¾ pound citron ½ pound candied cherries ½ pound candied pineapple (shredded).
Cream the butter, add sugar and cream again. Add extract, part of flour and mix well. Add egg yolks beaten until lightcolored. Now add the remainder of the flour, into which sift the baking powder, and add the fruit. Then add the egg whites beaten until dry and stiff. Bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Ice the groom's cake in 2 colors to harmonize with color scheme of table decorations.
Note-The Bride's Cake is distributed only to the attendants of the bride. It usually contains a ring. The Groom's Cake is cut by him and given to his attendants. This distinction is given so that mistakes may not be made. The wedding cake should be at least 3 months old before being cut to be at its best. -Mrs. A. W. Fraser, Iron Springs, Alta.
A light-coloured fruit cake in the wedding tradition, contributed by a Alberta homemaker. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before you start.
- The missing milkA cup of sweet (that is, plain unsoured) milk heads the list but is never mentioned again. Add it alternately with the flour, beginning and ending with flour; without it the batter will be too stiff to take two and a quarter pounds of fruit.
- Moderate oven350F. With this weight of candied fruit and a deep pan, one hour is optimistic — expect 1½ to 2 hours in an 8- or 9-inch round or a large loaf, and tent with foil once the top has coloured.
- "Beaten until dry"Period shorthand for very stiff whites. Take them to firm, glossy peaks and no further; genuinely dry whites break into lumps and refuse to fold in, and this cake depends on them for most of its lift — one teaspoon of baking powder to three cups of flour is very little.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from the thick-rinded citron fruit, not lemon peel and nothing to do with citronella. Sold in blocks or diced at Christmas; substitute candied lemon and orange peel if you cannot find it.
- Fruit and flourToss the fruit and almonds with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they will sink. Shredded here means cut in slivers or strips, not grated.
- Pan preparationLine the tin with a double thickness of parchment, sides included. A cake this dense and this long in the oven will catch at the edges in a bare pan.
- The three-month noteTraditional wedding cakes were aged because they were soaked in brandy or rum, which this one is not. A butter-and-milk cake left three months at room temperature will mould. Eat it within a week, or wrap tightly and freeze.
- YieldAbout 5 lb of batter — roughly 24 slender slices, which is the point: this is cutting cake, handed round in small pieces.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and drew heavily on recipes sent in by Canadian women, many printed with the contributor's name and town — here Mrs. A. W. Fraser of Iron Springs, Alberta. The bride's cake and groom's cake distinction the note describes was a real feature of turn-of-the-century weddings: two cakes, cut and distributed separately, the bride's often holding a ring or similar charm baked in as a fortune-telling token for her attendants. In much of the United States the groom's cake was the dark, spiced, spirit-soaked one and the bride's the pale, but the usage was never consistent, and this recipe — white cake heavy with almonds, citron and candied cherries, then iced in the colours of the table — sits somewhere between the two. The insistence that the cake be three months old reflects the older British fruit-cake practice, where alcohol did the preserving; it is advice inherited rather than tested against this particular batter.