Home › Cake Making and Baking › Light Cake
Light Cake
2 eggs 1 cup sweet cream 1 egg 1 cup sugar 1½ cups Five Roses flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt.
Bake in 2 layers.
A butterless layer cake that gets all its fat from cream, written in the extreme shorthand typical of the Five Roses ingredient columns. Two things need settling before you start: how many eggs, and how hot the oven.
- The egg countThe printed page was checked and the egg count is what our text now gives. Cream cakes of this kind take two whole eggs to 1½ cups flour, with a third giving a slightly richer, drier crumb.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means unsoured, not sweetened. Use plain heavy or whipping cream, around 35% fat. Half-and-half or table cream will give a leaner, tougher cake, since the cream is the only fat in the formula.
- No oven givenLayers of this size want a moderate oven, 350F to 375F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean. Books of the period often left the oven to the cook's judgement of a wood or coal range, or described it only in words such as "moderate."
- Ease back the baking powderThree teaspoons to 1½ cups flour is roughly double modern practice. Period baking powders are often said to have been weaker or less consistent, though that is hard to verify; today 1½ to 2 teaspoons is plenty, and the full three will give a coarse crumb and a faint metallic tang.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; for a finer crumb, replace two tablespoons of the flour with cornstarch.
- Method the recipe omitsBeat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick, stir in the cream, then fold in the flour, baking powder and salt sifted together. Do not beat once the flour is in — the leavening and the beaten eggs are doing all the lifting.
- Pans and yieldThe recipe says only "Bake in 2 layers"; two greased and floured 8-inch rounds suit this quantity. It makes a modest cake, eight to ten small slices, and is clearly meant to be filled and iced rather than eaten bare.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a promotional volume from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose mills were at Keewatin, Ontario, compiled from recipes sent in by users of the company's flour and distributed with it from the 1910s onward; it ended up in an enormous number of prairie and Ontario kitchens and is often described as one of the most widely owned Canadian cookbooks of its era. Recipes gathered that way tend to be terse, because the contributor already knew the method and only the proportions seemed worth writing down. A "light cake" built on cream rather than butter fits a rural pattern of baking: on a farm with a milk cow, cream was the fat closest to hand, and it saved the labour of creaming butter and sugar by hand before electric mixers. The same logic lies behind the many cream cakes, sour-cream cakes and buttermilk cakes in this section of the book.