Home › Cake Making and Baking › Marguerite Cake
Marguerite Cake
1 cup brown sugar ¼ cup butter 2 eggs ½ cup buttermilk ½ cup black syrup 1 teaspoon (small) mixed spice 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Bake in 2 layers. ½ cup butter ½ cup sugar ½ cup milk 2 eggs
A molasses-and-buttermilk spice cake baked in two layers, with a second short list of ingredients that is plainly a filling — the book leaves you to work out the method. A few things need translating before you start.
- The second ingredient listThe four items after "Bake in 2 layers" are almost certainly a filling or frosting rather than part of the batter: butter, sugar, milk and eggs. Nothing in the original says so, and no method is given; the likeliest reading is that they are beaten together and stirred over gentle heat until thickened, then cooled before spreading. What is clear is that they do not belong in the cake batter.
- Black syrupAlmost certainly dark molasses or treacle in period Canadian usage — not corn syrup, and probably not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate the cake. Fancy or cooking molasses is the closest match.
- Mixed spiceA pre-blended sweet spice, mostly cinnamon and nutmeg with smaller amounts of allspice, cloves and ginger. Pumpkin-pie spice is a serviceable stand-in, though the balance differs. "1 teaspoon (small)" most likely means a scant, level teaspoon rather than a heaped one.
- SodaBaking soda, and the full teaspoon is correct because it has both buttermilk and molasses to react with. Get the batter into the pans and the oven promptly; the lift is chemical and starts the moment the liquids meet.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, stronger than modern soft cake flour. Plain all-purpose is the right substitute. Measure the two cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, not scooping, or the cake comes out dry.
- Oven and pansTwo greased 8-inch round pans, 350F, 25 to 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the tin. Molasses cakes brown early and can look done before they are.
- YieldOne two-layer 8-inch cake, ten to twelve slices. It keeps better than a plain butter cake — the molasses holds moisture — but the milk-and-egg filling means it wants refrigeration after the first day.
Five Roses was the flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and its cook book, first issued in 1913 and reprinted for decades, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which explains the telegraphic style here, with ingredients run together and the method assumed. Cakes of this type, leavened with soda against buttermilk and sweetened with molasses rather than white sugar, were everyday baking in Canadian and northern American kitchens: cheap, dark, well-spiced, and forgiving of a wood-fired oven. The name is likely just the contributor's, or a compliment to a Marguerite; the book is full of such attributions and offers no explanation for any of them.