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Plunkets (to Be Eaten with Ice Cream)
3 4 Cream 1 cup butter, and gradually beat in 1 cup sugar. Beat the yolks of 6 eggs until light, and the whites until firm.
Then pour the yolks over the whites and beat both together. Pass through a sieve twice ½ cup Five Roses flour, ¾ cup cornstarch and 2 level teaspoons baking powder. Then add to other ingredients, adding 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. in gem pans. Two scant cups Five Roses flour may be used, leaving out the cornstarch.
A rich egg-and-butter batter closer to a pound cake than a muffin, baked in small tins and served alongside ice cream. The printed text is garbled in places, including the baking instruction, so a little reconstruction is needed.
- The missing instructionThe line reading only "in gem pans" is a printer's casualty; the batter should be spooned into greased gem pans and baked. The book gives no temperature or time, but a moderate oven, around 350F, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops spring back, suits a batter of this kind. The stray "3 4" at the head appears to be a page or recipe number rather than an ingredient.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin tin with rounded or oval cups, generally somewhat smaller than a modern muffin cup. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; fill the cups two-thirds full.
- Cornstarch as cake flourHalf a cup of flour with three-quarters of a cup of cornstarch is an early way of lowering the protein of a strong bread flour to something like cake flour. The alternative given in the last line, two scant cups of flour and no cornstarch, produces a noticeably sturdier crumb.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose flour. If you use the flour-only version, unbleached all-purpose is the closest match; the cornstarch version is more forgiving of whatever you have.
- Folding, not beatingPouring the beaten yolks over the firm whites and beating them together will already knock down some air. Fold the sieved dry ingredients in by hand rather than beating them in, or the cakes come out dense and low.
- Sifting twiceThe instruction to pass the dry ingredients through a sieve twice is doing real work here, distributing two teaspoons of baking powder evenly through a small amount of flour and breaking up the cornstarch. Do not skip it.
- YieldAbout 18 small cakes, or 12 standard muffin-sized ones. They are best eaten the day they are made.
Plunket is an old cake name found in English-language cookery books for a small rich cake of eggs, butter and sugar, in roughly the spirit of a pound cake; how far back the name goes is not settled. By the time it reached this Canadian book it had become a fairly loose label for a light, sweet, egg-heavy little cake, and the parenthetical direction to eat it with ice cream tells you what it was for: something plain and buttery to carry a dish of ice cream at a supper or reception. The Five Roses Cook Book itself was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and recipes throughout name the brand by way of advertisement; the cornstarch here softens a strong milling flour for a delicate cake.