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Sunshine Cake
Whites 10 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon extract 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar 1 cup flour Yolks 6 eggs 1 teaspoon cream of tartar Beat whites of eggs until stiff and dry, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, and extract. Cut and fold in flour mixed and sifted with cream of tartar. Bake fifty minutes in a moderate oven in an angel-cake pan.
A sunshine cake is an angel food that keeps the yolks, so the whole thing stands on how well the whites are beaten and how gently the flour goes in. There is no fat and no chemical leavening beyond the cream of tartar, which is there to stabilize the foam rather than to raise the cake.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the flour goes in, every stroke you take costs you volume. Sift the flour with the cream of tartar, add it in three or four additions, and cut down through the batter and up along the bowl rather than beating.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugar"Powdered sugar" is not modern confectioners' sugar -- In American books of this period powdered sugar generally meant a sugar ground finer than granulated, not the cornstarch-blended 10X sold today. Ordinary granulated or superfine (caster) sugar will serve; 1 1/2 cups weighs about 10 1/2 oz.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Foam cakes of this size are often more reliable at 325F for the same fifty minutes, since the outside sets before the center has risen fully at the higher heat.
- Egg quantitiesTen whites is roughly 1 1/4 cups; six yolks is a scant 1/2 cup. Eggs of the period may have run somewhat smaller and less uniform than today's large eggs, so measure by volume if you want to be exact. Separate them cold, then let the whites come to room temperature before beating.
- Cream of tartar placementThe recipe sifts it with the flour rather than beating it into the whites. It works, but beating a teaspoon of cream of tartar into the whites once they are foamy and before the sugar goes in gives a more stable meringue and a finer crumb.
- The panAn angel-cake pan is a tube pan, 9 to 10 inches, with a removable bottom if possible. Leave it entirely ungreased: the batter needs to grip the sides to climb, and grease will make it slump.
- CoolingInvert the pan as soon as it leaves the oven and leave the cake hanging until completely cold, an hour or more. Unmolding warm will collapse it. Loosen with a thin knife rather than turning it out by force.
- Doneness and yieldThe top should spring back when pressed and the cake should have begun to pull from the tube. One 9- to 10-inch cake, 10 to 12 servings. It is best the day it is made and dries quickly; serve plain, or with fruit and cream.