Home › Cake Making and Baking › Cheap Marble Cake
Cheap Marble Cake
1 egg 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk 2½ cups Five Roses flour (sifted) 2 teaspoons baking powder 4 tablespoons butter.
Take ½ the mixture and add 2 tablespoons molasses, 1 (small) teaspoon cloves, cinnamon and allspice. Drop first a spoonful of dark, then a spoonful of light batter. If desired, 2 tablespoons chocolate may be added to the dark part.
A plain eggless economy cake in which half the batter is darkened with molasses and spice. The original assumes you know the standard creaming method, the pan and the oven, so all three need filling in.
- Mixing method assumed, not statedCream the 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) butter with the sugar, sift the baking powder into the flour, and add flour and milk alternately. That was the standard creaming sequence of the period, which the recipe takes for granted.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; ranges of this period were judged by experience rather than by a dial. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter: roughly 35 to 40 minutes in an 8-inch square or 9x5 loaf pan, 20 to 25 in layers.
- The marbling is the hingeDrop the two batters in alternating spoonfuls as directed and stop there, or give one single pass with a knife. Stirring past that point turns the whole thing an even muddy tan and you lose the pattern entirely.
- "1 (small) teaspoon cloves, cinnamon and allspice"Most likely a small teaspoon of each rather than one teaspoon divided three ways, though the wording is ambiguous. If you find modern ground cloves assertive, a half teaspoon is plenty.
- The chocolateTwo tablespoons most likely means grated unsweetened baking chocolate, roughly half an ounce to an ounce depending on how finely it is grated. Cocoa powder can stand in at the same volume, but it absorbs liquid, so the dark half will be noticeably stiffer than the light.
- No eggs, and that is the pointThis is the "cheap" of the title. Expect a close, slightly dry crumb closer to a quick bread than a modern butter cake, and do not over-bake it, since there is no egg to hold moisture.
- Molasses and leaveningMolasses is acidic and may react with the baking powder in the dark half, so get the batters into the pan reasonably promptly rather than letting them stand.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 servings from one loaf or square pan.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and was built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which is why entries like this one are terse, unattributed and assume shared method. Marble cake in the nineteenth century was commonly a light-and-dark pairing achieved with molasses and warm spices rather than chocolate, since molasses was cheap and everywhere while chocolate for baking was comparatively costly; the chocolate here is offered only "if desired." The absence of eggs marks this as an economy recipe, useful when eggs were seasonal and dear and a cake still had to appear at tea.