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Water Melon Cake
By taking the white and red parts as given above, what is called a watermelon cake is readily obtained by baking in layers and putting the red between two white parts. ½ cup butter ¾ cup milk
This is a two-line note appended to a longer pair of cake recipes rather than a standalone formula, and it only makes sense with the white and red batters printed above it in the book. Read it as an assembly instruction with a stray ingredient list attached.
- It is deliberately incomplete"the white and red parts as given above" refers to the preceding recipes in the cake chapter, most likely a white cake with a portion tinted red. The half cup of butter and three-quarter cup of milk at the end appear to be a stray fragment of that parent recipe; on their own they are not a workable ingredient list.
- What the red part wasNineteenth and early twentieth century watermelon cakes coloured the red batter with cochineal, sometimes beet juice, and studded it with raisins or currants to stand in for seeds. Modern gel food colouring gives a cleaner red without thinning the batter; liquid colouring in the quantity needed will slacken it noticeably.
- OvenThin layers of a butter-and-milk white cake bake at 350F. Expect 20 to 25 minutes for 8-inch layers, less for 9-inch.
- Layer constructionThe instruction is simply red batter baked as its own layer and sandwiched between two white ones. Other period versions baked concentric rings in one pan so a slice showed a red centre; this layered form is the easier of the two and slices into stripes, not crescents.
- SeedsIf you add raisins or currants to the red layer, toss them in a spoonful of the flour first. Otherwise they sink to the bottom of the layer and the effect is lost.
- FinishingPeriod cooks iced the outside green, or white with green tinting, to complete the illusion of rind. Nothing in the text requires it, but the cake reads as an odd striped layer cake without it.
- YieldThree thin layers of a cake built on half a cup of butter will serve eight to ten. It is best the day it is made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour to Canadian households, and it leans heavily on cakes, where flour quality shows. Novelty cakes of this kind were a fixture of late Victorian and Edwardian baking, when aniline and cochineal colourings became cheap and reliable enough for home use and cooks began building cakes that imitated other foods. Watermelon cakes appear in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, usually as a white cake with a red, raisin-studded centre and a green icing rind; the layered version given here is a simplification. Its terseness lets the recipe lean on the page above it and say almost nothing on its own.