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Quick Layer Cake
1 cup sugar 1 cup (scant) milk 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 teaspoons baking powder in 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Mix and bake as usual. Put any filling between layers.
A skeleton recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how a layer cake goes together. The blanks are worth filling in before you start.
- "Mix and bake as usual"No method is given. The likeliest reading is a quick-bread style mix: whisk the dry ingredients together, stir in the milk and melted butter, and beat only until smooth. Overworking this batter toughens it, and with no egg to give structure there is nothing to hide behind.
- There are no eggsWhether that is deliberate or a slip in the original cannot be told from the page. Taken as written, expect a tender, slightly crumbly, plain-tasting layer closer to a sweet biscuit crumb than to a modern butter cake, and handle the layers gently when turning them out.
- Oven temperatureThe book leaves it unsaid, along with pan size and time. A moderate oven of about 375F on a middle rack, roughly 20-25 minutes in two 8-inch pans, is a reasonable modern starting point.
- A scant cupJust under a level cup — call it 7 fl oz rather than 8. The batter should pour thickly, not run.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, higher in protein than most modern all-purpose. Plain all-purpose works; 2 cups is about 250 g, and measuring by weight avoids the dense, dry result you get from scooping and packing.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in 2 cups of flour is standard and still correct, but old powders were often single-acting. Modern double-acting powder gives you a little more leeway between mixing and the oven — though this batter should still go in promptly.
- FatTwo tablespoons of melted butter is lean by current standards. Melt it and let it cool slightly so it does not seize when it hits cold milk; bringing the milk to room temperature first helps.
- Yield and fillingThe recipe gives neither pan size nor yield; two 8-inch layers is a reasonable reading. "Any filling" is left open: jam, lemon curd, sweetened whipped cream or a boiled icing would all suit a cake this plain.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, and like most milling-company books it existed to sell flour: recipes were solicited from housewives across Canada and printed with the brand name written into the ingredient list. That commercial origin explains the compression here. A cook who already owned the book needed only to be told what makes this one different — no eggs, no creaming, everything stirred together at once. Eggless cakes of this sort were common well before wartime rationing made them famous; they were the cake you made when the hens were off lay, or when company arrived without warning.