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Snowballs
2 cups sugar. 1 cup sweet milk ½ cup butter 3 cups Five Roses flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 5 eggs (whites).
Mix and beat well. Bake in deep square tin. Cut in 2 inch squares. Remove outside. Frost on all sides, then roll in freshly grated cocoanut.
A white cake baked flat, trimmed, cubed, iced on every face and rolled in coconut — the same construction as an Australian lamington. The printed ingredient list has one glaring gap, so read the first point before you start.
- The sugar is missingAs printed there is no sugar in the batter, which would give a bland, bready crumb. Comparable white cakes of the period take 1½ to 2 cups of sugar creamed with the ½ cup butter; assume a typographical omission rather than an intentional unsweetened cake.
- "Sweet milk"Fresh whole milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk called for in soda-raised recipes. Here the leavening is baking powder, so ordinary milk is correct.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods mills. Modern all-purpose works; if your flour is a strong bread flour, you can soften the crumb by replacing about 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch.
- Egg whitesFive whites is roughly ⅔ cup (a little over ½ cup, depending on egg size). 'Mix and beat well' gives no method; whites beaten to soft peaks separately and folded in last will give a lighter, whiter crumb.
- The tin and the ovenA 'deep square tin' suggests something like a 9-inch square pan, filled about two-thirds. No oven heat or time is given; for a cake of this size, 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean, is a reasonable modern reading.
- "Remove outside"Trim off all crust and browned surfaces before cutting, so every face is pale crumb. Chilling or even part-freezing the trimmed slab makes the 2-inch cubes cut cleanly and stops them shedding while iced.
- The icing has to be thinFor coating six sides, use a pourable icing — confectioners' sugar loosened with milk to the consistency of heavy cream — not a spreadable buttercream. Dip on a fork, let the excess drip, then roll immediately in coconut while still tacky.
- Coconut"Freshly grated" meant cracking a whole nut. Unsweetened desiccated or finely shredded coconut is the practical substitute; the sweetened flaked kind adds sugar on top of the icing.
- YieldA 9-inch square, trimmed and cut at 2 inches, gives about 16 snowballs.
The Five Roses Cook Book was a promotional book issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal in the early twentieth century, assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with the company's flour — which is why the entries are terse, uneven, and occasionally missing an ingredient, as this one is. Cake cubes iced and rolled in coconut turn up under several names in English-language cookery of the period; the Australian lamington is the version that kept a name. A plain sheet cake trimmed of its crust and cut into cubes yields a great many small, uniform, individually finished cakes from one baking.