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Dark Layer Cake
½ cup sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup syrup 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon soda in hot water 1 teaspoon mixed ginger, cloves and cinnamon ⅔ cup Five Roses flour.
Use nut filling.
This is a list of ingredients with almost no method, typical of the terse entries in the Five Roses cake chapter, where the general directions at the head of the section were expected to carry the reader. Here is what the gaps assume.
- What "syrup" meansIn a cake called dark, this is most likely molasses or a dark table syrup rather than a clear corn syrup. Fancy molasses or a dark cane syrup would give both the colour and the acidity the soda needs to work.
- The soda is the hingeOne teaspoon dissolved in a little hot water and stirred in last reacts immediately with the acid in the molasses. Have the pans greased and the oven at heat before the soda goes in, and get the batter into the oven at once.
- Order of mixingCream butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then the syrup, then the flour sifted with the spices, alternating with the boiling water. The dissolved soda goes in at the very end.
- Boiling waterA full cup of boiling water makes this a thin, pourable batter rather than a stiff one. That is correct for a molasses layer cake; it bakes light and slightly damp.
- OvenNo oven heat is given. Bake at about 350F. Two 8-inch or 9-inch round layers take roughly 25 to 30 minutes; the cake is done when it springs back and pulls slightly from the pan edge.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat all-purpose flour with no leavening in it. Use plain all-purpose, and note that the recipe carries no salt — a quarter teaspoon is worth adding.
- SpiceOne teaspoon total of ginger, cloves and cinnamon mixed, sifted with the flour. Cloves are the loudest of the three; a mix weighted toward ginger and cinnamon suits modern palates.
- Nut fillingThe cross-reference is to a separate filling recipe elsewhere in the book; such fillings were usually a boiled or cooked white icing with chopped nuts stirred through. Any nut-studded buttercream fills the same role.
- YieldTwo layers, about ten to twelve slices.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century, a promotional book built around a single brand of hard-wheat flour. Its recipes are written for cooks who already knew how to make a cake and needed only proportions, which is why entries like this one read as bare lists. The cake itself belongs to the large family of molasses cakes that dominated North American home baking at a time when refined sugar is generally said to have been dearer than syrup: the molasses supplies colour, moisture, keeping quality and the acid that lets a single teaspoon of soda do all the lifting. The soda is added dissolved in hot water rather than sifted with the flour, a method the recipe shares with others of its era.