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Burnt Sugar Cake
½ cup sugar 2 eggs 1 cup butter 1 cup white sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup cold water 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Take 1 cup white sugar and set on stove to burn until quite brown. Then add ½ 1/2 cup boiling water and stir well. When cool, add half to the cake mixture. Mix the rest with icing sugar and put on top.
A contributed recipe of the kind that assumes the reader already knows how to build a butter cake; the ingredient list is written loosely and needs untangling before you start.
- Sort the sugar firstThe list names sugar twice, and the method then calls for "1 cup white sugar" to be burnt, which is almost certainly the second of the two already listed. Read it as 1 cup creamed into the batter and 1 cup burnt on the stove for the caramel syrup, half of which goes into the cake and half into the icing.
- The butter is almost certainly too muchThe butter may be too much -- A cup of butter against 2 cups of flour, 2 eggs and a cup of water is very rich for the structure. Some similar cakes of the period call for half as much, and ½ cup is worth considering if the full cup gives a heavy, greasy crumb. Note that the original says a cup plainly; this is not a conversion problem.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the direct substitute. How the cups were filled is not stated; if you weigh, somewhere between 4 and 5 oz per cup covers the range from sifted to scooped.
- Burning the sugarMelt the sugar dry in a heavy pan over medium heat until it is deep amber and smells nutty. Taken past that it turns acrid and no amount of icing sugar will hide it.
- Adding the boiling waterMolten caramel is above 300F and will erupt violently when water hits it. Use a deep pan, add the water off the heat with your hand and face clear, then return it to low heat to dissolve any set lumps.
- Method the recipe omitsCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the cold water and half the caramel syrup, finishing with the vanilla.
- Oven and tin350F. Two 8-inch layers take 25 to 30 minutes; a single loaf or square runs 40 to 45. The original gives no oven guidance at all.
- The icingBeat the remaining caramel syrup into icing sugar a spoonful at a time until it is spreadable but not runny. Roughly 2 cups of icing sugar, depending on how much water boiled off.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, twelve to sixteen slices.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and much of it was assembled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which may account for the telegraphic style. Burnt sugar cake belongs to a family of turn-of-the-century American and Canadian cakes that got their flavour from a technique rather than a bottle: caramelised sugar dissolved in water made a syrup that coloured and flavoured both crumb and icing. The same syrup, kept in a jar, was a standard pantry item under names like burnt sugar colouring or caramel, used to darken gravies and puddings as well as cakes. The vanilla in this version is a small extra flourish on top of the caramel, not the main flavour.