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Little Gold Cakes
1/4 C butter. 1/2 C sugar. Yolks 4 eggs. 1/4 C milk. 7/8 C pastry flour. 7% C pastry flour 1 level t baking powder 1 t almond or orange extract Nut meats Cream butter, add sugar. Beat yolks until thick, add to milk and combine all. Sift flour and baking powder, and add. Bake in small moulds, ice and decorate with nutmeats. Recipe may be doubled if desired.
Mrs. Nellie Kimball.
A yolk-rich "gold" cake baked in small moulds, iced and finished with nuts. The method is standard creaming, but several of the terms and the equipment have shifted since the book was compiled.
- QuantitiesThe printed ingredient list is defective: an amount survives only for the flour (garbled in the text as "7% C"), the baking powder and the extract, while the butter, sugar, egg yolks and milk called for in the method are named nowhere. Gold cakes of this type commonly run in the region of 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 4-6 yolks and 1/2 cup milk, but any such figure is a reconstruction, not the author's.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is a soft, low-protein flour, roughly 8-9% protein. Substitute cake flour straight across, or use all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch.
- Small mouldsThese are gem pans or individual tin moulds, close in size to a modern muffin cup or a small fluted brioche tin. Grease and flour them well.
- OvenNo oven heat is given. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits cakes of this size; expect roughly 15-20 minutes and test with a straw or skewer at the centre.
- Yolks and milkThe recipe beats the yolks until thick and adds them to the milk before everything is combined, rather than beating them into the creamed butter. Have the milk at room temperature.
- ExtractAlmond extract is far stronger than orange; one teaspoon of almond in a single batch is assertive. Orange extract can be replaced with the grated zest of one orange for a fresher result.
- Icing and yieldThe recipe specifies only "ice"; a plain water icing (confectioners' sugar with a little milk or orange juice) is a plausible reading, spread while the cakes are cool and the nut meats pressed in before it sets. Yield cannot be worked out from the surviving quantities, though small moulds of this size would give something on the order of a dozen cakes.
Gold cake is the companion to silver cake, the pair being the standard nineteenth-century household solution to a bowl of separated eggs: whites into the white cake, yolks into the gold. Recipes for both run through American community cookbooks, and the two are often said to have been printed together so a cook could make them the same afternoon and waste nothing. The yolks give a dense, close crumb and a genuinely yellow colour, which is presumably the source of the name. Baking in "small moulds" rather than a single tin marks this as a tea-table or church-supper cake, meant to be handled without a plate, and the icing and nut meats are decoration for the same purpose. The recipe carries Mrs. Kimball's signature as a contributor.