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Cup Cake
2 cups sugar 3/4 cup butter 3 eggs 3 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda 1 cup milk (or water) Pinch of salt Beat the butter and sugar to a cream.
Add the eggs well beaten, then the milk in which the soda has been dissolved.
Add the flour with the cream of tartar and a little salt sifted together. Beat all together well, and flavour with lemon.
Bake in fairly quick oven.
A plain creamed butter cake leavened with the old cream of tartar and soda pairing rather than baking powder. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat the method as the useful part and lean on the traditional proportions the name implies.
- What "cup cake" means hereThe name is generally taken to refer to measuring by cupfuls rather than to cakes baked in cups, though small cakes baked in cups also went under the name. The classic ratio is one cup butter, two cups sugar, three cups flour, four eggs, which would fit the three cups of flour given here.
- Missing quantitiesThe butter, sugar and eggs are named in the method but no amounts are printed. Anyone baking from this page has to supply them, and the 1-2-3-4 proportion above is the standard the recipe assumes.
- Cream of tartar and sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda with one teaspoon of cream of tartar comes to somewhere between one and a half and two teaspoons of modern baking powder, depending on the conversion used. The mixture begins reacting as soon as it is wet, so get the batter into the tin promptly.
- Soda in the milkDissolving the soda in the liquid and sifting the cream of tartar through the flour keeps the alkali and the acid apart until the final mixing. Sift the flour, cream of tartar and salt together rather than stirring them, so the acid is evenly distributed; the yellow, bitter streaks cooks warned of come from undissolved soda, which here is already taken care of in the milk.
- Fairly quick ovenRead that as roughly 375F, bearing in mind the term is only approximate. A much hotter oven would set the crust before the centre had risen.
- Flavour with lemonLemon extract or essence, about a teaspoon, is the usual reading; finely grated zest from one lemon gives a cleaner flavour and can be rubbed into the sugar before creaming.
- Tin and timingThe full quantity will fill a 9-inch tube pan; as layers it may need three 8-inch rounds rather than two. Expect roughly 45 to 55 minutes for a tube pan, 25 to 30 for layers; test with a skewer at the centre.
- Butter temperatureCreaming butter and sugar to a genuine cream needs butter at around 65F. Too cold and it will not aerate, too warm and the batter breaks when the eggs go in.
Cup cake is one of the oldest measured-by-volume cakes in the English-language repertoire, appearing in American and Canadian household books through the nineteenth century as a companion to pound cake: on the usual account, where pound cake was weighed, cup cake was scooped, which suited kitchens with a set of cups but no scales, though an equally old sense of a cake baked in cups competes with it. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of its flour, gathered such recipes from Canadian home cooks, and the cream of tartar and soda leavening here reflects a kitchen that still kept the two chemicals separately rather than buying combined baking powder.