Home › Cake Making and Baking › Handy Cake
Handy Cake
1 egg 1 cup sugar. Butter size of egg ½ cup sweet milk 2 small teaspoons baking powder Five Roses flour to make stiff batter Flavor with vanilla Bake in 1 large tin or 2 small ones.
Ice with chocolate.
A characteristically terse Five Roses entry: no sugar, no eggs, no oven temperature and no timing. Some of that is period shorthand, but some of it looks like a genuine gap in the printed text, and it is worth knowing which is which before you start.
- The missing sugar and eggsAs printed, this makes an unsweetened flour-and-milk batter. Comparable "handy" and "one-egg" cakes of the era commonly carry sugar and one or two eggs, creamed with the butter. The original does not say so, and we will not invent quantities for it; the list may well be incomplete rather than a deliberately plain cake.
- Butter size of eggA standard old measure for about 2 oz, or 1/4 cup. Cooks judged it by eye against a hen's egg, which was reliable enough when butter came in a crock rather than in marked sticks.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Two small teaspoons"Small" here probably signals a level rather than a generous teaspoonful. Two level teaspoons of baking powder to about two cups of flour would be in line with modern practice, though the recipe gives no flour quantity at all.
- Stiff batterThe one instruction doing real work, since no flour quantity is given. Aim for a batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours. Adding flour past that point gives a dry, tight crumb.
- Tins and ovenOne large tin would be an 8- or 9-inch round or square; two small ones give thin layers for the chocolate icing. The recipe states no oven heat and no time. A modern equivalent would be around 350F, roughly 30 to 35 minutes for a single tin and 20 to 25 for layers, but that is a guess rather than anything the book says.
- YieldOn the assumptions above, a single 8- or 9-inch cake, eight modest servings, or a two-layer cake of the same size.
The Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, and it reads like it: entries were printed close to the form they arrived in, which is why the wording varies so much from page to page. "Handy" cakes belong to a whole family of quick everyday cakes - one-egg cake, cup cake, plain cake - built around chemical leavening rather than beaten eggs. Baking powder had been in general household use in North America since the later nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it had largely displaced the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method for cakes of this kind. The instruction to ice with chocolate is the only note of ceremony in the recipe, and it does the work of turning a plain milk cake into something fit to set before company.