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Tic-Tac-Toe Cake
2½ cups sugar 1 cup butter 1 cup sweet milk 2½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Mix and divide into 3 parts. In one part put: ½ cup raisins ½ cup currants ½ teaspoon nutmeg or cinnamon.
In another part put: 2 tablespoons grated chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.
In remaining part put: 1 teaspoon lemon extract.
A one-bowl batter split three ways to make a fruit, a chocolate and a lemon layer. The book, like most flour-company pamphlets of the period, assumes you already know how to assemble and bake a cake, so several things are left unsaid.
- The batter has no eggs and no baking timeAs printed, the ingredient list runs sugar, butter, milk, flour, baking powder — no eggs, and no instruction for pan, temperature or time. A cake with this much butter and sugar would normally carry several eggs, so something appears to be missing, whether dropped in setting or simply assumed. If you want to bake it, work from a modern layer-cake formula and use the three-way flavouring idea, which is the actual point of the recipe.
- Method implied, not statedCream the butter with the sugar, add eggs, then alternate the flour (sifted with the baking powder) and the milk. Divide the batter by weight rather than by eye — three parts of roughly equal size is what makes the finished slices read as a pattern.
- OvenThe book gives no oven direction. By modern practice, layers of this type bake at about 350F: three 8-inch layers take 25-30 minutes; a single loaf or tube pan with the three batters spooned in and swirled takes 45-55 minutes.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-raised cakes. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim gives a drier crumb.
- Grated chocolateTwo tablespoons of block chocolate grated fine, most likely unsweetened. Modern cocoa powder is not a straight swap — it is defatted and absorbs more liquid. Use grated unsweetened baking chocolate, stirred into its third of the batter.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small dark raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Toss the raisins and currants in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink through the fruit layer.
- Lemon and vanilla extractA full teaspoon of lemon extract is assertive by current standards. Half a teaspoon, or the zest of one lemon, gives the same effect without the medicinal edge.
- Assembly and yieldBaked as three layers, the pattern would show in the contrast of the cut face rather than on the surface; the recipe gives no direction for stacking or icing. Either way it serves roughly 10-12.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to Canadian households in very large numbers in the 1910s and after — its recipes were gathered from customers, which is why they read like handwritten cards and may also account for how little is spelled out in print. Cakes in which one batter is split and flavoured several ways were a novelty of the era; checkerboard and ribbon cakes are the best documented of them. The name appears to refer to the pattern rather than to any particular game rule, and the appeal was practical as much as decorative — one creaming, one oven, three flavours from a single afternoon's work.