Orange Cake
1½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ cup milk 2 egg whites 1 tablespoon orange extract Mix as Butter Cake, and bake in two-layer cake pans twenty minutes. Cool, fill with orange filling, and cover with orange frosting.
This is a shorthand entry: it lists only what differs from the book's base Butter Cake, so the fat and sugar are missing from the ingredient list and must be carried over from that recipe.
- The incomplete ingredient listAs printed, there is no butter and no sugar. "Mix as Butter Cake" means cream the fat with the sugar from that recipe, add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the beaten whites. A butter cake proportioned to 1½ cups flour will want roughly ½ cup butter and 1 cup sugar; check the book's own Butter Cake before you start rather than guessing at the bench.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. For two thin layers in twenty minutes, a moderate oven of roughly 350-375F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Test with a skewer at eighteen minutes; layers this shallow overbake quickly.
- Pans"Two-layer cake pans" gives no size. This quantity of batter suits two small round tins, greased and floured or lined; larger tins will give thinner layers that bake faster, so start checking earlier.
- Orange extractA full tablespoon is heavy by modern standards. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons and make up the difference with the grated zest of an orange, added to the butter and sugar so the oils release.
- Whites onlyTwo whites and no yolks make this a white cake, pale enough to show off the orange filling. Beat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last; stiff dry whites leave streaks and a coarse crumb.
- FlourFor a tender crumb, use cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch.
- Filling and frostingBoth are separate entries elsewhere in the book. Have them made and cooled before the layers come out, and let the cake go completely cold or the filling will slide.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, eight to ten servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the early 1900s it served both as advertising and as a usable domestic manual. Its cake recipes are built on a family of base recipes — Butter Cake, Sponge Cake — with variations written as brief deltas, which is why this orange cake reads as a fragment. Bottled flavoring extracts were cheap, shelf-stable and widely advertised in this period, and recipes of the era lean on them heavily. Layer cakes filled and iced in a single flavor were a fixture of American dessert baking by this date.