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Five Minute Cake
2 eggs ½ C orange juice 1/2 t lemon extract Pinch salt 1 C sugar 1% C flour 2 level t baking powder ¼ C soft butter Sift flour, sugar and baking powder all together in mixing bowl, add butter, eggs, salt and orange juice, and beat five minutes. Bake in a moderate oven.
A one-bowl cake from the era when "five minutes" meant five minutes of beating by hand. The typed original has suffered at the hands of the scanner, so read the quantities with care.
- Flour quantity unclearThe butter reads ¼ cup, matching the printed page. "1% C flour" remains a damaged fraction that could be 1½ or 1¾ cups; either reading gives a workable cake, so treat the flour as a reconstruction rather than a certainty.
- The orange juiceThe original clearly reads "1½ C orange juice," which against roughly the same quantity of flour would give a very thin batter. Either the juice or the flour figure may be mistyped; anyone baking from it should expect to adjust.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere in the 350-375F range. The recipe gives no pan or time; an 8-inch square or round would likely need roughly 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- The five minutesThat was the mixing time with a hand beater or a wooden spoon, and it is the whole point of the name. With a stand mixer on medium, two to three minutes is the equivalent; longer will overdevelop the gluten and toughen the crumb.
- Soft butterGenuinely soft, at cool room temperature, not melted. It has to disperse into the dry ingredients during beating, since there is no creaming step to do the work first.
- Lemon extractHalf a teaspoon flavours the cake distinctly; if you prefer a lighter hand, use a quarter teaspoon, or a teaspoon of grated lemon zest.
- YieldProbably one 8-inch layer, about eight servings. The recipe gives no icing or finishing instructions.
Church and club cookbooks are full of cakes named for how little trouble they take: five-minute cakes, one-bowl cakes, dump cakes, wonder cakes. Commercial baking powder and, later, electric mixers and boxed mixes all made the older creaming-and-folding sequence look laborious by comparison. Orange juice as the liquid instead of milk suggests a mid-century date, by which point canned and frozen concentrate had become common in American kitchens; juice turns up in cakes, gelatin salads and punches throughout compilations like this one. The recipe assumes its reader already knows what a moderate oven is and how long a cake takes.