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Ice Cream Cake
Cream one cup of sugar with one-half cup of butter. Add one-half cup of milk, one and three-fourths cups of flour sifted with two level teaspoons of baking powder. Beat well and fold in the beaten whites of three eggs and add one-half teaspoon of vanilla. Bake in two round tins or one biscuit tin from twenty to thirty minutes. Frost with the yolks of two eggs, thickened with confectioner's sugar and flavored with vanilla. This same cake recipe, flavored with almond extract and frosted with a boiled icing containing one-half cup of chopped blanched almonds, makes a delicious almond cake.
A plain white butter cake of the standard early-twentieth-century type. The cake itself is straightforward; the frosting given in the first version is not, and that is where the recipe breaks down for a modern kitchen.
- The frosting is uncooked egg yolkRaw yolks beaten with confectioner's sugar and vanilla are never heated at any point, and the frosting sits at room temperature on the finished cake. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that this preparation does nothing to reduce, and the sugar concentration in a yolk-and-sugar frosting is not high enough to be self-preserving. Use a current recipe for any frosting on this cake.
- The almond variantThe second frosting the recipe suggests is a boiled icing, in which sugar syrup is cooked and beaten into egg white; unlike the raw-yolk frosting, the egg in it is cooked by the hot syrup. The recipe offers it as a variation, flavoured with almond extract.
- "Ice cream cake" is not frozenNothing here is chilled or churned. The name is usually explained as referring to a very pale, fine-grained cake made with egg whites only — here the yolks go into the frosting — though the label was applied loosely in books of this period.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was common in recipes of this kind. A cake of this composition bakes well at around 350F. Twenty to thirty minutes suits two shallow round layers; a single deeper pan will want longer.
- "Two round tins or one biscuit tin"The round tins are most likely 8- or 9-inch layer pans. 'Biscuit tin' here probably means a shallow rectangular baking pan, but the size is genuinely ambiguous, so judge by depth of batter rather than by the stated time.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in after the flour has been beaten in. Beat them to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, or they will not fold into a batter this thick without deflating.
- YieldTwo thin round layers if 8-inch pans are used; serves roughly eight to ten, depending on how it is cut.
Cakes called "ice cream cake" appear in American cookbooks with no ice cream in them at all; the name is generally traced to the cake's pale, smooth, close crumb, the result of using beaten egg whites and no yolks. It belongs to the same family as silver cake, white mountain cake and lady cake, all light butter cakes built on beaten whites. The frugal logic of the page is worth noticing: three whites go into the cake, two yolks into the frosting, so almost nothing is wasted ncooked-yolk icings that no modern book would print.