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Birthday Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 1/4 cups brown sugar Yolks 2 eggs 2/3 cup milk 2 1/4 cups flour 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon orange extract 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 tablespoons Sherry 1/2 cup raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 1/2 cup walnut meats, cut in pieces 1/3 cup currants 2 tablespoons candied orange peel, finely cut Whites 2 eggs Follow directions for making butter-cake mixtures. Bake in a buttered and floured angel-cake pan in a slow oven one and one-quarter hours. Cover with Ornamental Frosting.
A creamed butter cake enriched with fruit, nuts and a spoonful of sherry, baked in a tube pan. The method is assumed rather than written out, so the sequence below matters more than anything else here.
- The butter-cake methodCream the butter, work in the sugar, then beat in the egg yolks. Add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk, stir in the flavourings, sherry, floured fruit and nuts, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. The whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, so fold rather than stir.
- Slow ovenA slow oven of this period is generally reckoned at about 300-325F, though sources vary. Given the sugar and fruit, the lower end is the safer reading; a hotter oven will set the crust long before the centre of a tube cake is done.
- Angel-cake panA one-piece or two-piece tube pan of about 9 or 10 inches. The central tube is not decorative here: it carries heat into a dense, heavy batter that would otherwise stay raw at the middle.
- Timing and donenessAn hour and a quarter is plausible at 300F, but check from about 60 minutes with a skewer in the thickest part of the ring. Fruit cakes brown deceptively early.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins sold near the sultanas, not fresh red or black currants. Combined with the seeded raisins they give the two textures the recipe is after.
- Seeded raisinsRaisins of this period were often sold with seeds in, and 'seeded' means the seeds had been taken out, whether by hand or by the machine-seeded packaged raisins then on sale. Modern seedless raisins need only be chopped, and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking.
- Candied orange peelBuy whole candied peel and dice it yourself if you can; the pre-chopped supermarket mixed peel is drier and more bitter than what was meant. Two tablespoons is a background note, not a fruitcake load.
- SherryTwo tablespoons of a medium or cream sherry. It works with the orange extract rather than reading as alcohol, and there is no substitute that does the same job except a little orange juice, which will be sweeter and thinner.
- Yield and frostingA tube cake of about ten inches, serving roughly ten to twelve. Ornamental Frosting is the stiff beaten egg-white and confectioners' sugar icing used for piping; cool the cake completely before covering it or the icing will slide.
Birthday cakes in American cookbooks of this era are often not a distinct formula but a butter cake dressed up: fruit, nuts, a spoonful of wine and a hard white frosting that could be piped with a name or a date and would hold its shape on a table for an afternoon. The Boston Cooking-School style of writing, which this recipe follows, gives a list of ingredients and then a cross-reference to a general method the reader was expected to have learned already.