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Plain Layer Cake
1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup sweet milk 3 eggs 1 cup Five Roses flour ½ cup cornstarch 3 teaspoons baking powder.
Bake in 3 tins, and when cool spread with jelly.
Note on Layer Cake-Ordinary layer cakes should bake in from 15 to 20 minutes.
A bare-bones ingredient list of the kind that assumed every reader already knew the creaming method. The proportions are sound; only the leavening and the missing procedure need attention.
- The method the book leaves outCream the softened butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk in two or three additions. Mixing everything at once with this much butter gives a heavy, close crumb.
- Flour plus cornstarchOne cup flour to half a cup cornstarch is a homemade soft-flour substitute. Five Roses was milled from Canadian hard spring wheat and would have been stronger than a modern bleached all-purpose, so the starch served to weaken it. If you use cake flour, drop the cornstarch and use 1½ cups cake flour total.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for 1½ cups of dry mixture works out to 2 teaspoons per cup, half again as much as current practice, and an excess of baking powder tends to give a coarse, dry crumb with a faintly metallic edge. Modern proportion is about 1 to 1¼ teaspoons per cup of flour, so 1½ to 2 teaspoons is enough here.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh milk, as distinct from the soured or buttermilk used in soda-leavened cakes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction; 350–375°F suits thin butter layers. The book's own note of 15 to 20 minutes fits three thin layers; test at 15.
- The tinsThree tins, size unstated; three shallow 8-inch layers is a reasonable reading, greased and floured or lined. The batter is modest, so each layer bakes up thin — closer to a filled sandwich cake than a tall modern layer cake.
- The jellyStir the jelly smooth first, or warm it briefly, so it spreads without tearing the crumb. Use it sparingly between the layers; the cake has no frosting and will slide if the filling is loose.
- YieldOne three-layer 8-inch cake, 10 to 12 servings. Best the day it is made, as there is no icing to seal the surface.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour — one of the most widely circulated Canadian cookbooks of the early twentieth century, with the brand name written into the recipes themselves. "Plain" cake in this period meant unfrosted and unspiced rather than dull: butter, sugar, eggs, milk and flour in even proportions, split into layers and stuck together with whatever jelly the household had put up. The cornstarch is the telling detail. Commercial cake flour was not yet a fixture in every kitchen, and cutting a stronger flour with starch to soften it was a common workaround — a substitution that still works. The generous baking powder is in keeping with the era's confidence in a leavener that had become cheap and reliable only in the preceding decades.