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Moonshine Cake
Whites 10 eggs Yolks 7 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups sugar 7/8 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon almond extract 1 cup pastry flour Add salt to whites of eggs and beat until light. Sift in cream of tartar and beat until stiff. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon colored and add two heaping table-spoons beaten whites. To remaining whites add gradually sugar measured after five siftings. Add almond extract and combine mixtures. Cut and fold in flour, measured after five siftings. Bake in angel-cake pan, first dipped in cold water, in a slow oven one hour. Have a pan of hot water in oven during the baking. Cover with Maraschino Frosting. Follow recipe for Ice Cream Frosting, adding to sugar one-half teaspoon cream of tartar, and flavor with maraschino. Sprinkle with almonds blanched, shredded, and baked until delicately browned.
A sponge cake in the angel-food family, enriched with yolks and leavened entirely by beaten whites. Success rests on the folding, not the ingredients.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe flour and the yolk mixture must be cut and folded into the whites with a spatula, turning the bowl as you go. Any stirring or beating at this stage deflates the foam and the cake will bake dense and rubbery.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" in this period is usually taken as about 300-325F. The recipe does not specify a pan size; an hour at around 325F suits a standard tube pan, and the cake is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The pan of hot waterMost likely meant to keep the oven moist so the crust does not set too early, though it would also steady the heat; the recipe does not say. In a modern oven kept shut it is optional and does no harm.
- Do not grease the panDipping the tube pan in cold water rather than buttering it is deliberate. A foam cake needs to grip the sides as it rises, so use an ungreased two-piece tube pan and invert it to cool completely before turning out.
- Five siftingsBoth flour and sugar are measured after sifting five times, which aerates them and gives a lighter measure than a scooped cup. Weigh instead if you can: about 100 g pastry flour and 300 g granulated sugar.
- Pastry flourRoughly 9 percent protein. Substitute cake flour, or use all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch.
- Cream of tartar7/8 teaspoon is an odd-looking figure; whatever the reason for it, the acid stabilises the whites and keeps the crumb white. Round to a scant teaspoon.
- The frostingThe ice cream frosting recipe is not on this page. In this era such frostings were built on a boiled sugar syrup, sometimes beaten into stiff egg whites and sometimes beaten alone until creamy, so check the cross-reference rather than assuming an Italian meringue. Maraschino here is the clear cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries.
- YieldOne tube cake, 10 to 12 servings. Like other sponge cakes it dries out quickly and is best the day it is made.
Moonshine cake belongs to the American wave of egg-white cakes that followed the spread of reliable hand-operated egg beaters and finer bolted flours in the later nineteenth century. Angel food was the pure white version; sunshine cake used yolks as well and baked yellow; moonshine sits between the two, pale gold from a smaller number of yolks -- though the name is a nickname and the between-the-two reading is folk explanation rather than documented. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carried whole families of such cakes, and the names were as much marketing as description. The maraschino frosting and shredded almonds mark it as company food, the sort of cake made for an afternoon reception rather than a family supper.