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Bride's Cake (No. 2)
1/2 cup butter. 1½ cups fine granulated sugar 1 cup milk 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 6 eggs (whites) Lemon and orange extracts 1 teaspoon almond extract Cream the butter, add sugar and cream again. Add milk, flour and baking powder. Fold in the egg whites and 6 drops each of lemon and orange extracts, also 1 teaspoon almond extract. Bake slowly 45 minutes.
A plain white butter cake leaning on egg whites for lift and colour, with the perfume of three extracts. The ingredient list has a hole in it that needs filling before you start.
- The missing butterThe method opens with "cream the butter" but no quantity is listed — a printer's omission. Comparable white cakes of the period use ½ to ¾ cup (4–6 oz) butter for 3 cups flour and 1½ cups sugar; ½ cup gives a lighter crumb, ¾ cup a richer one. The original amount is genuinely unrecoverable from the page.
- "Bake slowly"Period usage generally puts a slow oven somewhere around 300-325F, though the book gives no figures. At that sort of heat a large single layer will need closer to an hour; 45 minutes suits two 8-inch layers or a shallow pan. Test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Fine granulated sugarThis is ordinary granulated sugar, which in the period came in coarser grinds than today's. Modern granulated works directly; caster sugar creams a little faster if you have it.
- Order of mixingAs written, milk and flour go in together, which invites a tough crumb. Alternate them — a third of the flour, half the milk, and so on, ending with flour — then fold in the whites in two additions.
- Egg whitesSix whites is roughly ¾ cup. Beat to soft, glossy peaks, not stiff and dry, or they will not fold in without deflating and you will get streaks.
- The extractsSix drops each of lemon and orange is a whisper; a full teaspoon of almond extract is not. Almond extract is potent, so start with 1/2 teaspoon and judge from there.
- FlourFive Roses was milled from hard spring wheat and sold as a general household flour. For a tender white cake use all-purpose, or replace 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch to approximate cake flour.
- YieldTwo 8-inch layers, or one 9-inch square. Traditionally finished with a white boiled or royal icing rather than buttercream.
White cake made only with egg whites became the standard "bride's cake" in North America in the later nineteenth century, the whiteness of the crumb often read as carrying the same symbolism as the dress -- a fashion made practical by the spread of cheap refined sugar, chemical baking powder, and finely milled white flour, all three of which this recipe depends on. It commonly sits alongside a darker, fruited wedding cake in books of the era: the pale cake cut and eaten at the reception, the rich one boxed and sent home with guests or kept for an anniversary. Leftover yolks had obvious uses in a gold cake, custard or mayonnaise. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, and was distributed to promote the mill's hard spring-wheat flour -- which explains why the flour is named and the butter, unluckily, is not.