Layer Cake
Bake Simple Butter Cake in four square shallow pans. Fill with lemon cream, cocoanut cream, chocolate cream, or jelly. cup butter 1½ cups sugar 8 egg yolks 1 egg 24 cups flour
This is less a standalone recipe than an assembly note: bake the book's Simple Butter Cake batter in four thin layers and stack it with a cooked cream filling. The ingredient list appended here is a yolk-rich butter cake, and several of its quantities cannot be read with confidence.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe butter is given with no amount at all, and the flour figure as printed is not a usable number. For a batter with 1½ cups sugar and 8 yolks, cross-check against the Simple Butter Cake entry elsewhere in the book rather than guessing here; no leavening or liquid is listed in this fragment, and presumably that recipe accounts for them.
- OvenThin butter-cake layers want a moderate oven, 350F. Shallow pans bake fast — 15 to 20 minutes for a layer under an inch thick. They are done when the centre springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan.
- Square shallow pansThe size is not given; any four matched shallow square pans will do, greased and floured, or lined with parchment. If you own two pans, bake in two batches and keep the batter covered at room temperature; do not let it sit an hour.
- "Cocoanut"The period spelling of coconut. For the filling this means grated or desiccated unsweetened coconut stirred into a cooked cream, not the sweetened flake sold for topping.
- The cream fillingsLemon, coconut and chocolate creams in this era are cornstarch- or flour-thickened custards, cooked until they mound on the spoon and cooled completely before spreading. Warm filling will slide the layers apart and soak the crumb.
- Eight yolks and one whole eggThat ratio gives a deep yellow, close, tender crumb rather than a springy one. Bring the eggs and butter to room temperature and cream thoroughly; the aeration from creaming is doing much of the lifting.
- Assembly and yieldThree layers of filling between four cakes, with the top left plain or given a thin icing — a four-layer square cake cuts into about 12 to 16 servings. Chill briefly before slicing so the filling sets enough to hold a clean edge.
- Leftover whitesEight whites remain. They can go into a boiled icing to finish the cake, or into a white cake; they keep three or four days refrigerated and freeze well.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like the Baker's and Hershey's booklets of the same decades it existed to put cocoa and chocolate into American home baking. That commercial purpose shows in an entry like this one: the cake itself is generic, deferred to another page, while the interest lies in the fillings, one of which is chocolate cream. The layer cake in this form — thin butter layers stacked with a cooked cream rather than buttercream — is generally associated with the era of reliable chemical leavening and standardised pans, when a home baker could more often count on four even layers coming out of the oven. Splitting a cake into four shallow tiers rather than two thick ones was arguably a way of making a modest amount of batter look generous on the table.