Home › Cake Making and Baking › Wedding Cake (No. 1)
Wedding Cake (No. 1)
4 cups brown sugar 2 pounds butter 2 cups molasses ½ cup sour milk 6 cups currants 6 cups raisins (seeded) ½ pound mixed peel 2 teaspoons cinnamon nutmeg ½ teaspoon pepper 2 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons cloves 2 teaspoons mixed spice 1 teaspoon mace 10 cents worth almond nuts (cut fine) Five Roses flour to stiffen.
Note-Some cooks add 1 pint brandy. (See also recipes for Bride's Cake (2) and Groom's Cake, with note.) 12 eggs
A full-scale dark wedding fruitcake of the old Canadian pattern: no flour quantity, no oven temperature, no timing. Everything the modern baker needs has to be supplied from outside the text.
- "Flour to stiffen"The one genuinely ambiguous instruction. With 2 lb butter, 12 eggs, 4 cups sugar and 2 cups molasses, the batter will take somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 cups of flour before it holds a spoon upright; work in the last of it by feel. The finished batter should be heavy and barely droppable, not pourable.
- ScaleThis is not a single cake. The batter runs to roughly 14 to 16 pounds and needs several deep tins or one very large one. Halving or quartering the recipe is entirely reasonable.
- OvenRich fruit batter must bake slow: 275-300F. A cake of this depth will want three to four hours or more, tested with a skewer. Line the tins with a double thickness of parchment and wrap the outside with brown paper or a folded newspaper collar to keep the edges from scorching before the middle sets.
- Sour milkCultured buttermilk is the direct substitute. It is there to react with the soda; plain milk soured with a spoon of vinegar works if buttermilk is unavailable.
- Soda, not baking powderTwo teaspoons of soda are balanced against the molasses and the sour milk, both acidic. Do not swap in baking powder, and do not let the batter stand around once the soda goes in.
- Mixed peel and mixed spiceMixed peel is candied citron, orange and lemon peel, sold as such around the holidays. "Mixed spice" is the British blend, usually built on cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg with smaller amounts of coriander, ginger and cloves; pumpkin-pie spice is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- Ten cents worth of almondsA dead measure. It probably amounted to something in the range of a quarter to half a pound of almonds; half a pound suits the quantity of fruit here.
- The pepperHalf a teaspoon of black pepper in a sweet cake is deliberate and old-fashioned, not a misprint. It sharpens the clove and mace rather than reading as heat.
- Brandy and keepingThe optional pint of brandy is a preservative as much as a flavouring. Traditionally the cooled cake is wrapped in spirit-dampened cloth and stored airtight for weeks or months before icing, which is how these cakes were made well ahead of the wedding.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it circulated in enormous numbers in Canadian households in the early twentieth century, contributed to largely by the women who bought the flour. Its wedding-cake chapter runs to several numbered versions, plus a separate Bride's Cake and Groom's Cake, which is typical of cookbooks of the period. Cakes of this weight and richness were built to keep, which is why they were mixed weeks ahead and why the top tier was often saved for a christening. The instruction to buy "10 cents worth" of almonds is a reminder that these books were written for readers who shopped by the coin rather than the scale, and that flour, in a mill's cookbook, was never going to be measured too precisely.