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Prune Cake (Mrs Geo Smith t baking powder)
Mrs. Geo. Smith. ½ t baking powder added to flour 1 C stewed prunes and little juice ½ t each cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves Cream shortening and add the sugar. Cream again and stir in the eggs.
Next mix in the prunes, juice and spices. Lastly add the flour and milk alternately and beat well. Bake in layers in a quick oven. 3 T chocolate 1 t vanilla Filling: 2 C powdered sugar 3 T butter, melted Mrs. Graeff.
Mix to the desired thickness with black coffee.
This page has come through transcription badly: the base quantities for shortening, sugar, eggs, flour and milk never made it onto the page, and the fractions have lost their slashes. It is workable only as a template against a standard spice-layer-cake formula.
- The missing half of the ingredient listThe method calls for shortening, sugar, eggs, flour and milk, none of which appear with amounts. A cake of this size in a community book of the period would run to roughly 1/2 cup shortening, 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup milk, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- "12 t" is a lost fractionRead as 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. The baking powder is likelier 1 1/2 teaspoons than 1/2 for two cups of flour, but the original genuinely does not tell us which.
- Quick ovenPeriod usage puts a quick oven at roughly 400-425F, hotter than modern practice wants for layers. Thin layers at that heat bake fast and scorch easily at the edges; the recipe gives no time, so watch them.
- Stewed prunesDried pitted prunes simmered in water until soft, then chopped or mashed, with a spoonful or two of the cooking liquid. Prune baby food or lekvar gives the same moisture; unsoaked prunes will not.
- Where the chocolate and vanilla goThe 3 tablespoons chocolate and 1 teaspoon vanilla sit between the cake method and Mrs. Graeff's filling with no home. The more natural reading is that both belong to the filling, making it a mocha-chocolate icing, but the page does not say so.
- The fillingTwo cups powdered sugar, 3 tablespoons melted butter, and black coffee added by eye is a pourable coffee glaze rather than a buttercream. Add the coffee a teaspoon at a time; it goes from stiff to runny in almost nothing.
- YieldUnknowable, since the flour, sugar and egg quantities are missing; the instruction is only 'bake in layers'. On the inferred quantities above it would suit two 8-inch layers.
Prune cake belongs to a large family of American dried-fruit cakes that solved a specific problem: fresh fruit was seasonal, but prunes, raisins and dates kept on a pantry shelf all winter and brought their own moisture and sweetness to a batter. Spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, the type shows up in community and society cookbooks, usually credited to a named contributor as here. Those attributions are the point of a book like this one: the recipes circulated by reputation within a congregation, and the name at the top was the guarantee. The two names on this page, one for the cake and one for the filling, are a small record of how such collections were assembled, and the missing quantities are a reminder that contributors wrote for neighbors who already knew what a cake batter looked like.