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Orange Layer Cake
Make a simple one-egg cake for the layers and place on them thin slices of oranges before icing with plain boiled icing (see Introductory Recipes). On the top of the cake around the edge, may be placed the sections of the oranges as a finish to the icing. A custard filling may be substituted for the icing (See Lemon Custard Cake).
This is an assembly recipe rather than a standalone one — it assumes you already have a one-egg cake batter and a boiled icing on hand elsewhere in the book. A few things need translating, and one structural problem needs solving before you build it.
- The hinge: dry the fruitFresh orange slices laid directly on cake will weep juice into the crumb within an hour and the layers will slide. Blot the slices thoroughly on paper towels, or macerate them briefly with a spoon of sugar, drain, and blot. Assemble close to serving.
- "A simple one-egg cake"One-egg cakes were lean, economical butter cakes rather than rich four-egg ones; proportions varied from book to book, but something on the order of 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, milk, flour and baking powder is typical. The recipe gives no pan size, temperature or time; baked as two thin 8-inch layers it will take roughly 20 to 25 minutes at about 350F.
- Boiled icingThis is the poured-syrup meringue: a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, beaten in a thin stream into stiff egg whites. A candy thermometer replaces the period habit of testing threads off a spoon. It sets to a dry, matte shell and must be spread while still warm and fluid.
- "Sections of the oranges"Read against the "thin slices" earlier in the recipe, this most likely means segments rather than wheels. To free them of membrane, cut away peel and white pith, then release each segment from the membrane with a paring knife; membrane left on tends to dry out and toughen as the cake stands.
- Choice of orangeNavels are seedless and slice cleanly; Valencias are juicier and more likely to flood the cake. Blood oranges look striking against white boiled icing. Avoid anything with thick pith.
- The custard alternativeThe recipe sends you to its own Lemon Custard Cake, which is not reproduced here, so the filling's composition is unknown. If you use a starch-thickened citrus custard in its place, put it only between the layers and cook it fully to a boil, so the starch loses its raw taste and the yolk's starch-degrading enzyme is deactivated.
- YieldTwo 8-inch layers give 8 to 10 slices. Boiled icing does not keep — it weeps and cracks by the next day, so this is a cake to finish the day it is made.
Orange desserts appear in profusion in American cookbooks from about 1890 onward for a plain commercial reason: refrigerated rail cars and the maturing Florida and California citrus groves turned the orange from a Christmas-stocking luxury into a grocery staple available most of the year. The one-egg cake behind this recipe belongs to the same thrifty tradition — chemical baking powder had made lean batters reliable, and the fruit and the glossy boiled icing did the work that butter and eggs would once have had to do. The terse cross-referencing style, sending the reader to "Introductory Recipes" for the icing, is often said to have been common in period cookbooks, which are generally thought to have assumed a cook who had already worked through the basics rather than one dropping in on a single page.