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Peanut Cake (T butter C flour t baking)
1 T butter 1½ C flour 1½ t baking powder Mix above ingredients well and bake in a sheet in a moderate oven. When cool cut into slices and frost on all sides and roll in finely ground peanuts. 2 C powdered sugar 1/2 C butter Icing 4 T milk Mrs. Richard Earle.
A church-supper cake reduced to shorthand, and the shorthand has lost some of it: as printed, the batter is butter, flour and baking powder with no sugar, egg or liquid. Read the points below before you shop.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOne tablespoon of butter with 1½ cups flour and 1½ teaspoons baking powder cannot make a sheet cake — there is no sugar, no egg and no liquid. Something has clearly been lost between the contributor's card and the printed page. Treat this as a finishing-and-frosting method and borrow the batter from any plain 1½-cup-flour white or hot-milk sheet cake, which will want roughly a cup of sugar, one or two eggs, and half a cup of milk.
- The abbreviationsT is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, C is cup, as in most American community cookbooks that use level standard measures rather than the older "teacupful" and "spoonful."
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350 to 375F. A thin sheet cake in that range takes about 20 to 25 minutes; check at 18, since the whole point is a cake firm enough to cut into neat blocks.
- "Bake in a sheet"A quarter-sheet pan or a 9x13 is the modern equivalent, and for this quantity of flour the batter should sit about half an inch to three-quarters of an inch deep. A thick cake will not slice into tidy cubes.
- The icing is a butter glaze, not buttercreamThe icing -- Two cups powdered sugar, half a cup butter and four tablespoons milk gives a soft powdered-sugar icing, a little slacker than a stiff modern frosting, which suits coating all six sides of a cut block. If it stiffens as it stands, warm it briefly and thin with a teaspoon of milk at a time.
- Chill before cuttingCool the sheet completely, then refrigerate it for half an hour. Cold cake cuts cleanly and does not shed crumbs into the icing while you are coating the sides.
- The peanuts"Finely ground" here means chopped fine, not reduced to butter — pulse roasted unsalted peanuts in short bursts or chop by hand. Spread them in a shallow pan and roll each iced block; work with two forks or the icing ends up on your hands.
- YieldA 9x13 sheet cut into 2-inch squares gives about two dozen small cakes.
Peanut cakes of this kind — plain cake cut into blocks, iced on every face and rolled in chopped peanuts — belong to a family of small iced cakes that includes the Australian lamington and the iced petits fours of the same general era, though no direct line of descent should be assumed. Peanuts had shifted from a Southern field crop and street snack to a widely available national grocery item by the early twentieth century, and cooks put them into everything from brittle to sandwich fillings. The appeal for a fundraising supper is obvious: one sheet cake becomes two dozen individually finished portions that travel well and require no plates.