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Bride's Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar Whites six eggs 1/2 teaspoon almond extract Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. Bake forty-five to fifty minutes in deep, narrow pans. Cover with white frosting.
A plain white butter cake leavened with egg whites and baking powder. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing you have to supply.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. Forty-five to fifty minutes suits the deep, narrow pans called for; a wider, shallower pan will be done in 25 to 30 minutes.
- "Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes"The base recipe is not reproduced here, but it points to the standard creaming method: cream butter and sugar, add milk and sifted dry ingredients alternately, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Folding rather than beating at that final stage helps keep the crumb light.
- Egg whitesSix large whites are about 3/4 cup, or 180 ml, if you are working from carton whites. Eggs of the period were not sold to standard sizes, so measuring the whites by volume is the safer route.
- Baking powder and cream of tartarThree teaspoons of baking powder in 2 1/2 cups of flour is at the upper end of current practice; 2 1/2 teaspoons is ample with modern double-acting powder. The 1/4 teaspoon of cream of tartar is listed with the dry ingredients, and the recipe does not say what it is for.
- FlourFlour used for cakes in this period was generally softer than today's all-purpose. Use cake flour if you have it, or replace two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- Deep, narrow pansA tube pan or deep loaf-shaped pans; the forty-five to fifty minute bake suits that depth rather than shallow layer tins.
- White frostingMost likely a boiled or similar hard white icing, pale and firm enough to hold a decoration, rather than a buttercream.
- YieldAbout twelve to sixteen slices from a single tall cake.