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Christmas Cocoanut Cake
2 cups sugar ¾ cup butter 4 eggs ½ cup milk (Four Layers) 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Vanilla Cocoanut Mix ingredients as usual, reserving the egg whites for filling. Beat whites with 2½ cups sugar added gradually until stiff, white and smooth. Then add cocoanut, spread filling, and sprinkle thickly top and sides with cocoanut. 2 eggs
A plain creamed butter cake split into four thin layers, held together with an uncooked coconut meringue icing. The original assumes a cook who already knows the method, so the useful work is in filling the gaps.
- "Mix ingredients as usual"Cream the butter and the 2 cups sugar, beat in the 4 egg yolks, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the ½ cup milk, finishing with vanilla. The whites of those 4 eggs go to the icing, not the batter, which makes this a yolk cake — close-grained and pale gold rather than white.
- The stray "2 eggs"The trailing "2 eggs" does not belong to the recipe as printed above and is most likely a stray fragment picked up from adjacent text. Using the 4 whites called for in the cake list gives a generous amount of icing for four layers; 2 whites with proportionally less sugar (about 1¼ cups) is enough for a thinner coat.
- Pans and "four layers"Two cups of flour will not fill four standard pans to any depth. Bake in three 8-inch pans, or bake two 8-inch layers and split each horizontally to get four.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Layer cakes of this size want about 350°F for 20 to 25 minutes.
- CocoanutThis means desiccated coconut — dry, finely shredded and unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut is wetter and much sweeter; if you use it, cut the icing sugar back or the cake will be cloying. Nothing here is toasted, which suits a white cake.
- The icing is uncookedBeating 2½ cups sugar into raw whites gives a stiff, glossy meringue that sets to a crust without heat. Because the whites are never cooked, use pasteurized egg whites, or make a boiled seven-minute icing instead and fold the coconut into that.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 2 cups flour is right for today's double-acting powder as well, but get the batter into the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- YieldOne four-layer 8-inch cake, 12 to 16 servings. The meringue sets to a crust over the crumb; because the icing contains raw white, keep the cake cold and eat it soon.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and was distributed cheaply to buyers of Five Roses flour — one of the most widely circulated Canadian cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and for many households the only cookbook in the house. Its recipes come largely from customers, which explains the compressed, assume-you-know-it style here. A tall white coconut cake was a common festive centrepiece by this period, desiccated coconut having become comparatively cheap and shelf-stable by the late nineteenth century. Reserving the whites for the icing and building the cake on the yolks used up both parts of the egg.