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Ice Cream Cake
1 cup sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup milk 1¾ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 3 eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla Cream the sugar with the butter. Add milk, then the flour sifted with the baking powder. Beat well and fold in whites of eggs. Add vanilla. Bake in 2 tins from 20 to 30 minutes. Frost with yolks of eggs and white sugar.
A plain white layer cake from a Canadian milling company's cookbook, economical in that the whites go in the batter and the yolks go on top. The batter is sound; the frosting is the problem.
- The frosting is uncooked egg yolk"Frost with yolks of eggs and white sugar" means raw yolks beaten with sugar and spread on a cooled cake — nothing brings them near a safe temperature, and the frosting sits at room temperature for as long as the cake lasts. Raw yolk carries a Salmonella risk that sugar does not mitigate. Use a current frosting recipe instead.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; period cookbooks of this kind often left it to the cook's judgement of the range. A butter layer cake of this size will bake at about 350F, which is consistent with the stated 20 to 30 minutes.
- The flourFive Roses was a Canadian flour milled from hard spring wheat, stronger than modern all-purpose. Modern all-purpose can be substituted; measure 1¾ cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, since dip-and-sweep can add roughly 30 grams and dry the crumb.
- Baking powder quantityOne teaspoon for 1¾ cups of flour is light by current standards, but the three beaten whites are doing most of the lifting. Do not increase it — more powder with folded whites gives a coarse, collapsing crumb.
- Creaming and foldingThe hinge of the method: cream butter and sugar until genuinely pale, then add liquid and flour with restraint, and fold the whites in last with a spatula rather than beating them in. "Beat well" applies to the batter before the whites, not after.
- Tins'2 tins' most likely means two round layer tins of about 8 inches, greased and floured or lined. Larger pans will give thinner layers and will bake more quickly than the stated time.
- YieldA two-layer cake serving 8 to 10.
In cookbooks of this period "ice cream cake" rarely means a frozen dessert; the name is often said to refer to the icing rather than the cake — a cake finished with a rich icing, here made from the yolks left over after the whites went into the batter. That thrift is the point of the recipe: nothing from the three eggs is wasted. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, Limited, of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households as advertising for its flour, which is why the brand name appears in the ingredient list. Its cake chapter is a good record of what a home baker was expected to know without being told — how long to cream butter, and how to judge a layer by touch.