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Cream Cake
2 eggs 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup thin cream 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1 2/3 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon mace 1/4 teaspoon ginger Put unbeaten eggs in a bowl, add sugar and cream, and beat vigorously. Mix and sift remaining ingredients, then add to first mixture. Bake thirty minutes in a shallow cake pan.
A butterless spice cake in which the fat comes entirely from cream. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing you have to supply.
- Oven temperatureThirty minutes in a shallow pan points to a moderate oven, 350F. Test with a skewer at 25 minutes; a thin layer this rich in sugar browns quickly at the edges.
- Thin creamThis is light cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat, not heavy whipping cream. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent; heavy cream will make the crumb greasy and heavy.
- No butter, so beat the eggs wellThe whole structure depends on beating the unbeaten eggs, sugar and cream until pale and noticeably thickened, several minutes by hand or three or four with a mixer. Skimp on this and the cake bakes dense.
- Shallow cake panAn 8-inch square or 8-inch round pan, greased and lined with paper, gives a thin layer of an inch or so. A deeper pan will need longer and risks a damp center.
- Fold, do not beat, at the endOnce the sifted flour, baking powder, salt and spices go in, combine only until no dry streaks remain. Extended mixing after the flour toughens the crumb.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons for 1 2/3 cups flour is generous by modern standards but consistent with the period; it is not a misprint, and the cake wants the lift given the absence of creamed butter.
- SpicesCinnamon, mace and ginger together read as a mild sweet-spice blend. Ground mace loses its perfume fast, so use a jar opened within the year or substitute a slightly smaller quantity of nutmeg.
- YieldOne 8-inch layer, nine to twelve small squares. Good plain with tea; it is not a frosted cake, though a dusting of sugar suits it.
Cakes leavened with baking powder and enriched with cream rather than butter turn up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks. The reasoning is usually taken to be agricultural -- a household with cream on hand daily could use it directly rather than churning, weighing and sometimes selling butter -- though that is inference rather than documented practice. Grouping the chemically leavened cakes, gingerbreads and quick loaves with the biscuits and muffins was common in books of this era, since all of them relied on baking powder rather than yeast and were mixed and baked within the hour. The cinnamon-mace-ginger combination was a familiar household spicing, mace in particular being more common in period baking than it is now.