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Orange Cake
6 ounces sugar ½ pound Five Roses flour 1 orange 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teacup milk ½ cup butter.
Put the eggs and sugar into a basin, and beat for 10 minutes. Add the rind of the orange grated. Sift in the flour and baking powder. Pour in the milk and mix all together. Butter a cake tin and bake in a moderate oven for ½ hour. Use the juice of the orange for the icing. 1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 1-2-3-4 CAKE 3 cups Five Roses flour 4 eggs 1 cup cold water (or milk) 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Sift the cream of tartar and soda with the flour twice before adding. The addition of 1 cup raisins makes a pleasing variety.
Two cakes are run together here, as often happens in the crowded cake chapters of early Five Roses editions. The orange cake is the first recipe; the 1-2-3-4 cake that follows is a separate, complete formula whose title was set in the middle of its own ingredient list.
- The missing eggsThe orange cake's ingredient list omits eggs, yet the method begins "put the eggs and sugar into a basin." Three eggs suit this quantity of flour and sugar; two will give a denser crumb.
- Weights to cupsSix ounces sugar is about ¾ cup granulated by the period's 8-ounce cup. Half a pound of flour is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups, measured by scooping and levelling rather than packing. Half a cup of butter is one stick.
- A teacup is not a measuring cupTeacups of the period varied, but about 6 fluid ounces is a common reckoning, so half a teacup is roughly 3 ounces -- a generous ⅓ cup of milk. If the batter looks stiff after the flour goes in, a spoonful more milk is within the spirit of the recipe.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour suits a single 8-inch round or an 8-inch square; a loaf tin will want 40 to 50 minutes and a skewer test.
- The ten-minute beatingWith only 1 teaspoon of baking powder in the list, the air beaten into eggs and sugar does much of the lifting; beat until pale, thick and ribboning, which a stand mixer will manage in five to six minutes on high. Folding the flour in rather than beating it helps keep the volume.
- Butter, unspecifiedThe butter is listed but never mentioned again in the method, which calls for butter only to grease the tin. Melting it, cooling it and folding it in last, after the milk, is one workable way to get it into the batter.
- The icingNo sugar quantity is given. The juice of one orange takes roughly 2 to 2½ cups sifted confectioners' sugar to reach a spreadable glaze; add the juice to the sugar gradually rather than the reverse.
- Cream of tartar and sodaIn the 1-2-3-4 cake these two together do the work of baking powder, and sifting them with the flour twice distributes them evenly; undissolved soda can leave specks and a soapy taste. If substituting, about 4 teaspoons baking powder stands in for the 1 teaspoon soda and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar.
- YieldThe orange cake serves about eight. The 1-2-3-4 cake is much larger: two 9-inch layers, 25 to 30 minutes, or a tube pan, 45 to 55 minutes, at 350F.
The "1-2-3-4" cake is a mnemonic formula -- one butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs -- widely printed in nineteenth-century North American household cookery and surviving into twentieth-century commercial cookbooks because it needed no book to remember. Its appearance here, wedged into an orange cake, is characteristic of the Five Roses Cook Book, which the Lake of the Woods Milling Company assembled largely from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives. The orange cake itself takes a single orange for both the flavouring, through its grated rind, and the icing, through its juice, so nothing of the fruit is wasted.