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Four eggs One cup of sugar BUFFALOUEA One cup of flour One teaspoon of Larkin Baking Powder One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Beat the eggs thoroughly without separating them.
Beat in the sugar; add flour and Baking Powder.
Pour into tins quickly and bake at a temperature of 360° F.
SPONGE CAKE No. 2 Three eggs One cup of sugar One cup of flour One tablespoon of cold water Two teaspoons of Larkin Baking Powder Beat thoroughly before putting into tins.
Two sponge cakes from a Larkin Company premium booklet, printed with the brand names of the products the reader was expected to have bought. The text as it survives is damaged: the first recipe's heading and its egg and sugar quantities have dropped out, so only the second is complete enough to follow.
- The first recipe is incompleteThe line printed as "Buffalouea" appears to be a garbled heading (the reading is uncertain); the recipe lists only flour, baking powder and flavoring, then tells you to beat eggs and sugar that were never given amounts. Judging by the companion recipe below it, three eggs and one cup of sugar to the cup of flour is the likely proportion, but that is inference, not what the page says.
- 360°F is meant literally360°F is stated as a number -- many books of the period say only "a moderate oven." Round it to 350F and expect roughly 20 to 25 minutes for a layer, longer for a loaf pan.
- "Larkin Baking Powder"In practice a modern double-acting baking powder can be used measure for measure. The brand name is there as advertising; the formulation Larkin sold is not recorded.
- Whole eggs, not separatedThe instruction to beat the eggs "thoroughly without separating them" is the hinge of the first cake: whole eggs and sugar beaten together until pale and thick enough to hold a ribbon on the whisk. That foam does much of the lifting, though the teaspoon of baking powder is also doing real work.
- Folding in the flourNeither recipe says to fold, and the second in fact says to beat thoroughly. If you want to keep the foam, sift the flour over it in two or three additions and cut it in with a spatula rather than beating.
- "Pour into tins quickly"A whole-egg foam starts deflating as soon as you stop beating, so have the pans prepared before you begin.
- Pan size and yieldOne cup of flour and three eggs gives a modest batter, enough for a thin 8-inch round layer or roughly eight cupcakes. Doubling is straightforward if you want a two-layer cake.
- No fat in either cakeThese are true sponges: no butter, no milk. They stale quickly and are best eaten the day they are baked, or split and filled.
The Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York built a very large mail-order business in the United States on a scheme it called the Larkin Idea: buy a box of soap, receive a premium — a chair, a lamp, a set of dishes — and skip the retailer altogether. Booklets of recipes were part of the apparatus, and every ingredient with a Larkin label attached to it here is doing double duty as an advertisement. The two sponge cakes themselves are conventional foam cakes of a kind common in American recipe books of the early twentieth century. Numeric oven temperatures such as 360°F, rather than "moderate," tend to appear as thermometers and thermostatically controlled ranges spread, though a single figure like this cannot date the page precisely.