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Date Layer Cake
Use the "One, Two, Three, Four" recipe (see Introductory Recipes) and bake in layers. Ice with a plain, boiled icing (see Introductory Recipes) in which, as it cools, should be stirred one cup of stoned, chopped dates.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it leans on two staples the book assumes you already know, the "One, Two, Three, Four" cake and a boiled icing. Here is what those meant in practice.
- The One, Two, Three, Four formulaThe name is the ingredient list: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 4 eggs, plus about 1 cup milk and 2-3 teaspoons baking powder. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly, beat in the eggs, then alternate flour and milk.
- Layer sizes and ovenThe batter fills three 8-inch or two 9-inch pans. Bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes for 8-inch layers; period books would call this a moderate oven and give no number.
- Boiled icing, and its one hingeBoiled icing means a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, poured in a thin stream into stiffly beaten egg whites and beaten until it holds. Undercook the syrup and the icing will never set on the cake.
- When to add the dates"As it cools" matters. Fold the dates in once the icing has thickened enough to mound on the beater but is still spreadable. Added while the icing is hot and slack, they sink and weep sugar.
- Stoned means pittedDates of this period generally came whole, with the stone in. Buy pitted dates and still check them for missed pits. Chop fine, roughly the size of a currant, or the icing tears when spread.
- Choice of dateSoft Medjools are sticky and will clump; a light dusting of the cake flour keeps the pieces separate. Drier dates, such as Deglet Noor, chop more cleanly.
- YieldA three-layer cake serving 12 to 14. Boiled icing is at its best the day it is made; it dries and cracks by the second day.
The "One, Two, Three, Four" cake is a mnemonic recipe, the name doubling as the formula so a cook could hold it in her head without a book, and it turns up under that name in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Its usefulness here is that the book treats it as a blank base: the introductory recipes give the cake and the boiled icing once, and later recipes ring changes on them. That dates could be a casual filling at all reflects the trade of the period, when pressed dates shipped from Persian Gulf and North African ports became a cheap, shelf-stable sweet in American groceries, and later were grown commercially in the California desert. Boiled icing, sometimes called white mountain frosting, was the standard glossy white finish before butter-and-confectioners'-sugar frostings took over, and chopped fruit or nuts were sometimes folded into it as it cooled so that one icing could serve many cakes.