Home › Cake Making and Baking › Strawberry Short Cake (No. 1)
Strawberry Short Cake (No. 1)
2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons sugar ¾ cup milk ½ cup butter Strawberries.
Mix the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar, and sift twice. Work in the butter with the tips of the fingers, and add the milk gradually. Toss on floured board, divide into two parts. Pat and roll out. Bake in pie tins in a hot oven 15 minutes. Split and butter.
Sweeten strawberries to taste, crush slightly and put between and on top of the short cake.
Cover the top with whipped Decorate top with whole raw berries. Serve at once. cream.
To Cut a Short Cake-Take a firm hold of a piece of silk thread at either end as you would a knife. It will not make it soggy like using a knife. Especially good for splitting hot shortcake.
A biscuit-dough shortcake, not a sponge — the dough is handled like pastry and baked in two rounds. The text as printed has scrambled lines near the end: the intended order is whipped cream over the top, then whole berries as decoration.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as roughly 425-450F. At that heat the 15 minutes given is plausible for two thin rounds; the layers should be pale gold and dry at the centre.
- Pie tinsTwo 8- or 9-inch round tins. Divide the dough in half, pat each into the tin to the edges, and bake both at once on the same rack.
- Butter cold, hands quickThe hinge of the recipe. Working the butter in "with the tips of the fingers" means leaving it in flakes, not creaming it — cold butter and minimal handling are what make the layers short rather than bready. Stop mixing when the milk is just absorbed.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour; ordinary all-purpose is the equivalent. Sifting twice is worth keeping, since the baking powder is being distributed by sifting rather than by long mixing.
- Split and butterSplit while hot, using the silk-thread trick the book appends, and butter the cut faces immediately so the butter melts in. Buttering the split layers belongs to the older biscuit-dough treatment rather than to a sponge base.
- BerriesThe recipe gives no quantity; about 1 quart (roughly 1 1/2 lb) hulled berries suits two layers this size. Sugar and crush them lightly ahead so they give up juice, which soaks into the buttered cut surfaces.
- CreamAround 1 cup heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks. The recipe specifies no sugar for the cream, the sweetening being in the fruit.
- Yield and timingServes about six, cut in wedges. "Serve at once" is not decoration -- the assembled cake softens quickly once the juice is in it, so build it just before serving.
Shortcake in North America began as a sweetened biscuit dough rather than a cake, and this recipe preserves that older sense: "short" refers to the fat cutting the gluten, the same word used of shortcrust and shortbread. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and given away or sold cheaply to Canadian households buying its flour, which is why recipes tend to name the brand in the ingredient list. A second version of strawberry shortcake exists, though the title is all we know of it. The silk-thread splitting note is the kind of practical scrap that milling-company books collected from their readers; the same method turns up for cutting angel cake, where a blade tears rather than slices.