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Lemon Cake
2 cups white sugar ½ cup sweet milk 1 cup butter 2 teaspoons baking powder 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 eggs (beaten separately).
Mix as usual, sifting the baking powder and flour together before adding. Add the eggs last of all, the whites and yolks beaten separately. Bake in layers, and spread with filling preferred.
A plain butter layer cake whose name comes entirely from what goes between the layers — there is no lemon in the batter itself. A few conventions of 1915 baking need translating.
- "Mix as usual"This means the creaming method: beat the butter and sugar until pale and light, add the milk alternately with the sifted flour and baking powder, then fold in the yolks and finally the stiffly beaten whites. The separately beaten whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, so fold rather than stir.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk used in recipes leavened with soda. Do not substitute buttermilk here — there is no soda to react with it.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose blends. Standard all-purpose works; if your flour is high-protein bread flour, swap a couple of tablespoons per cup for cornstarch to keep the crumb tender.
- SaltNone is listed, on the assumption that the butter was salted. Use salted butter, or add about half a teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- Oven and pansNo oven direction is given; "bake in layers" is all the recipe says. Three greased and floured 8-inch round pans at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes works, until a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back. Baked as one full-depth cake it would need a lower heat and considerably longer.
- Where the lemon goes"Filling preferred" leaves it open, but the title points to a cooked lemon curd or a lemon cornstarch filling — juice and zest of two lemons, sugar, an egg or two and a little cornstarch, cooked until thick and cooled before spreading. Grating the zest of one lemon into the batter is a reasonable liberty.
- YieldRoughly three thin 8-inch layers, or two generous ones; twelve to sixteen servings. The batter is thick -- spread it to the pan edges rather than expecting it to level itself.
Cakes like this one are the backbone of the North American layer-cake tradition that took hold once chemical leavening became cheap and reliable: a one-butter, two-cup-sugar, three-cup-flour formula close to the old "cup cake" proportions, baked thin and stacked with whatever filling the household had to hand. The name attaches to the filling, not the batter, which is why the same crumb turns up in period books as chocolate cake, orange cake or jelly cake depending on what is spread between the layers. The Five Roses Cook Book itself was a promotional volume issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, assembled largely from recipes contributed by Canadian users of the brand; the flour is named throughout for obvious commercial reasons, and the collection is a useful record of what plain baking looked like in Canadian kitchens in the years around the First World War.