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Caramel Cake
3 teaspoons butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs ½ cup milk 1½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Bake in layers.
Caramel filling. [951
A bare ingredient list of the kind that assumed the cook already knew how a layer cake is put together. The proportions are a standard one-egg-per-third-cup-sugar butter cake, but two things need attention before you start: the fat quantity and the filling that is named but never given.
- The butter is almost certainly a misprintThe butter looks like a misprint — three teaspoons is one tablespoon, very little fat for a cake built on a cup of sugar and three eggs. Butter cakes of this type usually call for several tablespoons or more, so it is safest to read this as three tablespoons at minimum.
- Five Roses flourFive Roses flour — A Canadian hard spring wheat flour, closer to modern all-purpose than to soft Southern flour. Plain all-purpose works; period cups of flour were generally sifted and lighter than a modern scooped cup, so spoon into the cup and level rather than packing it.
- No salt, no flavouringNo salt, no flavouring — Neither is listed here, as often happens in these compressed lists. A quarter teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla bring it into line with what a modern palate expects, and neither affects the structure.
- Method, since none is givenMethod, since none is given — Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. The batter will be on the thin side for the amount of flour; pour it as it is.
- Pans and ovenPans and oven — "Bake in layers" is all the recipe says: no pan size, no number of tins, no oven guidance. Two 8-inch rounds, greased and floured, suit the quantity; bake in a moderate oven, around 350–375F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- The filling is left to youThe filling is left to you — The recipe names a caramel filling and cross-refers to it; the filling itself is not given here. A boiled caramel filling of the usual sort — brown sugar, butter and cream or milk cooked to the soft-ball stage, then cooled and beaten until it thickens — is what the name implies. Spread it while it is still spreadable, as it sets quickly.
- YieldYield — If baked as two 8-inch layers, the quantity gives thin layers, enough for eight or so. It is a modest cake by modern standards; doubling gives a more familiar height.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and circulated in enormous numbers in the early twentieth century, offered cheaply or given away to buyers of Five Roses flour. Its recipes were contributed by Canadian housewives, and the telegraphic style here is one common to promotional flour books generally: a list of what goes in, a two-word instruction, and the assumption that any reader knows how to cream butter and judge a layer cake. Caramel cake in this tradition is not a caramel-flavoured batter but a plain butter cake carrying a boiled caramel filling, the sugar-and-cream confection doing all the work. The name accordingly belongs to the filling.