Bride's Cake

This entry is shorthand: it points back to the book's Silver Cake and adds a short ingredient list, so it only works if you treat the Silver Cake rule as the actual recipe. A few things need translating before you start.

• The list is incompleteThe three lines given — ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour — read as proportions rather than a complete formula: no eggs, liquid or leavening are listed, so the Silver Cake entry has to supply them. Read that page first.
• Silver cake means whites only"Silver" cakes use egg whites and no yolks, which is what gives the pale crumb wanted for a wedding cake. Gold cake, its partner in these books, used the leftover yolks so nothing was wasted.
• Angel cake panThat is a tube pan with a hollow centre, left ungreased in angel food work but greased and floured for a butter cake batter like this one.
• Oven temperatureNo setting is given on this page; any temperature comes from the Silver Cake rule. For a butter cake of this size in a tube pan, around 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent.
• Judging donenessSixty minutes is a long spread. Start checking at forty minutes with a skewer in the thickest part of the ring, and expect the cake to shrink very slightly from the tube when it is done.
• Creaming is the hingeIf the Silver Cake rule follows the usual pattern of creamed butter and sugar with whipped whites, the rise depends largely on air beaten in at those stages; fold the whites in gently and avoid overmixing once they go in.
• YieldA one-cup-flour cake in a tube pan gives a shallow ring, enough for only a few servings. A cake for an actual wedding would have to be scaled up or baked in layers for tiering.