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Cocoanut Loaf Cake
6 eggs (whites) 1½ cups powdered sugar ¾ cup butter 1 cup sweet milk 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon lemon essence Bake this as a loaf cake, and the next day cut off the upper and lower crusts.
Trim off the sides, and slice in four layers. Grate 2 cocoanuts and put in the icing. Spread each layer top and sides with plenty of the icing. When cut, it will be perfectly white all through and a very handsome cake.
A white layer cake built the old way: baked as a plain loaf, rested overnight, then trimmed and split into four layers. The recipe assumes you know the creaming method and the icing, so both need filling in.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" sugar means finely ground granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the right substitute; ordinary granulated will work if you cream it thoroughly with the butter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Use whole milk.
- The flourFive Roses was a strong Canadian hard-wheat flour milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Modern all-purpose is close enough; if you want a tenderer crumb, replace half a cup of it with cake flour.
- Method, which the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, add the milk and sifted flour with baking powder alternately, stir in the lemon essence, then fold in the six whites beaten to soft peaks last. Adding the whites early is the usual way this cake goes dense.
- Pan and ovenA loaf cake of this size wants a deep pan of about 9 by 5 inches, or two smaller ones. Bake at 350F for roughly 55 to 70 minutes in the large pan, until a skewer comes out clean; the batter is heavy and slow to set in the centre.
- Why wait until the next dayA warm cake tears when you split it. Overnight rest firms the crumb so the crusts shave off cleanly and the four layers cut level, which is the whole point of the trimming.
- Two cocoanutsTwo whole coconuts grate out to somewhere around 6 to 8 cups, depending on size. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut substitutes directly; sweetened flaked will make the icing cloying, since the icing is already sugar-heavy.
- The icingNo icing is given. A boiled white icing — sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites — is a common choice for coconut cakes of this date: it sets firm enough to hold four layers and stays white. You will need a large batch to coat every layer, top and sides.
- YieldTrimmed and layered, this serves about 12 to 16 in narrow slices. The trimmings are worth keeping for trifle.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in Winnipeg and Montreal, and much of its content came from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with the brand — which is why the instructions assume so much shared knowledge and explain so little. A cake made with whites only was called a white or silver cake, the counterpart to the gold cake that used up the yolks, and thrifty cooks are often said to have baked the pair in sequence. Coconut cake became a showpiece of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an ascendancy usually attributed to steamship and rail freight bringing whole coconuts inland at prices ordinary households could manage; grating two of them by hand was real labour, and the trimmed, four-layer, blindingly white result was meant to be seen as well as eaten. The instruction that it will be "perfectly white all through" is the selling point: uniform whiteness signalled fine flour, fresh butter and a careful hand at the oven.