Cup Cake
1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 3 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 cup milk 4 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder Put together according to general directions, bake in two brick loaves or one large one.
Using but half a cup of butter and a scant measure of sugar makes a plain cup cake that is useful for layer.
A heaping tablespoon of yellow ginger makes this cake a most delicious ginger bread. Omit the milk and add enough Gold Medal flour to roll out and it can be baked as jumbles, or with half the milk and flour to roll out, as cookies.
A classic 1-2-3-4 batter given as a template rather than a single cake: the same bowl becomes loaves, layers, gingerbread, jumbles or rolled cookies. A few of the book's assumptions need spelling out.
- "General directions"The book's own cake instructions, printed elsewhere and not on this page. They would almost certainly describe the standard creaming method of the period: cream the softened butter and sugar until light, beat in the eggs, then add the milk and the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately, beginning and ending with flour, mixing only until the flour disappears.
- Brick loavesA brick loaf is simply a rectangular loaf pan; two of them correspond roughly to two 8x4-inch tins, and one large one to something nearer a 9x5. Grease and line the bottoms.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the usual modern equivalent for a batter of this kind; expect roughly 45 to 55 minutes for two small loaves, 60 to 75 for one large, 25 to 30 for layers. The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- FlourGold Medal was milled from hard spring wheat; modern all-purpose is a close enough substitute, though today's blend is softer. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling; 3 1/2 cups scooped straight from the bag can run a couple of ounces heavy and will dry the cake.
- EggsUse large eggs, at room temperature. Cold eggs added to creamed butter will curdle the mixture and cost you volume.
- Yellow gingerMost likely plain dried ground ginger rather than preserved or green. A heaping tablespoon is aggressive by modern taste; two teaspoons gives a clearly gingered cake, and a little molasses in place of some of the sugar brings it closer to what many people now expect from gingerbread.
- The jumble and cookie variationsThese turn the batter into a rollable dough by removing liquid and adding flour. With four eggs still in it the dough will be soft, so chill it thoroughly before rolling and roll thin. The recipe gives no temperature; a fairly quick oven, about 375F, for 8 to 10 minutes is the usual modern equivalent.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. This is a large quantity of batter: two loaves will slice generously, or it will fill two to three 8-inch layer tins.
The name has nothing to do with paper liners or small tins. A cup cake was a cake measured in cupfuls rather than weighed on scales, and this particular set of cupfuls -- one butter, two sugar, three (or three and a half) flour, four eggs -- is the ratio American cooks knew as the 1-2-3-4 cake, related to the English pound cake but lighter and, here, raised with baking powder rather than by egg foam alone. Its appearance in a Gold Medal book, with three cakes and two kinds of cookie wrung out of a single formula, is of a piece with milling-company cookbooks, which had every reason to favour a batter that could be steered several ways over four separate recipes. The instruction to "put together according to general directions" also suggests a reader who already knew how to make a cake and needed only the proportions.