Home › Cake Making and Baking › Fig Loaf
Fig Loaf
½ cup butter 1 cup granulated sugar ½ cup sweet milk 2 cups Five Roses flour (sifted) 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 3 eggs (whites) Figs Gradually Beat butter to a cream. beat in sugar, then alternately milk and sifted Five Roses flour with baking powder. Flavor with vanilla extract and beat in whites of 3 eggs beaten stiff.
Have ready about ½ pound table figs, cut in two or three pieces, and drop these pieces in batter here and there as it is being poured into buttered pan. Bake in moderate oven, and ice when it becomes cold.
A plain white butter cake with dried figs suspended in it. The method is old-fashioned creaming with stiff whites folded — or rather beaten — in at the end, and the fig placement is the only unusual step.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. A loaf of this batter will likely need roughly 45-55 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre.
- Pan size and yieldThe quantities suit about one standard loaf pan; the recipe specifies only a buttered pan.
- Sweet milkSimply plain unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk used with soda in other recipes. Since this cake is raised with baking powder, do not substitute buttermilk.
- Table figsWhole dried figs sold for eating out of hand, not fig paste or preserves. Half a pound is about 225 g; snip off the hard stem tips and cut each fig into two or three pieces as directed.
- The egg whitesThe original says to beat the stiff whites into the batter. Folding them in instead, in two or three additions, keeps more of the air beaten into them.
- Distributing the figsDropping the pieces in as the batter goes into the pan spreads them through the loaf rather than letting them collect; layer batter, scatter fig, repeat.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the heavy side by modern standards; two teaspoons of a current double-acting powder will do.
- IcingThe recipe calls for icing but does not say what kind. A plain water icing -- icing sugar with a little milk or lemon juice -- suits the cake, and the loaf must be fully cold first or the icing will slide.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, presented as a collection of recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, and it was very widely distributed in early twentieth-century Canada. A fig loaf belongs to a family of "white cakes" -- egg whites only, so the crumb stays pale -- that fill the cake chapters of these books, distinguished from one another mainly by what is dropped into the batter. Dried figs reached Canadian kitchens from the Mediterranean and, by the 1900s, from California.