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Sunshine Cake
½ teaspoon cream of tartar 6 egg whites 1½ tablespoons orange juice 1 teaspoon lemon juice Beat yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and flavoring and continue beating. Mix and sift flour and cream of tartar four times. Cut and fold in stiffly beaten whites, alternately with flour. Bake in an angel cake pan one hour in a moderate oven. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs ½ cup milk
A foam cake of the angel-food family, leavened entirely by beaten egg and stabilized with cream of tartar. Everything depends on how much air survives the folding.
- Moderate ovenPeriod usage generally puts this around 350F, and for a delicate tube-pan sponge the lower end of that range (about 325-350F) is safest. The recipe's full hour suits the cooler end; at 350F it is worth testing earlier.
- The pan is never greasedThe pan -- the recipe calls only for an angel cake pan, i.e. a deep tube pan. Standard practice for foam cakes is to leave it ungreased so the batter can cling to the sides as it rises, though the recipe itself is silent on the point.
- Cool upside downThe recipe does not say so, but foam cakes of this type are conventionally inverted on the pan's feet or over a bottle neck until cold; cooled right side up the crumb tends to compress and sink.
- Cream of tartarIt is sifted with the flour here rather than beaten into the whites, but the work is the same: acidifying the batter so the foam sets fine-grained and pale. Baking powder is not an equivalent swap, since it brings its own leavening and alkali.
- Sifting four timesNot fussiness. Repeated sifting aerates the flour and makes it light enough to fold in without deflating the whites. The recipe says only "flour"; a soft, low-gluten flour suits the method.
- FoldingThe recipe directs the whites and flour to be added alternately, cutting down through the batter and turning it over rather than stirring. Stop the instant no dry flour shows.
- Egg whitesBeat to firm peaks that still look glossy. Dry, cracked-looking whites will not fold in cleanly and leave white streaks in the baked cake.
- YieldOn a six-egg batter, roughly a standard tube pan's worth, 10 to 12 servings.
Sunshine cake sits between the two great American foam cakes of the late nineteenth century: angel food, which uses whites alone, and the yellow sponge, which uses whole eggs. It takes the whipped-white structure of one and the yolks of the other, and the name is often said to come from the crumb being a deep yellow rather than the snow white of angel food. Cakes of this kind spread more widely once mechanical egg beaters and reliably fine-milled flour arrived, though they were made by hand before that, and whisking whites to a stiff foam was serious labour. That it appears in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is unsurprising: such books were promotional but had to function as complete household references, so the dessert chapters carry the full standard repertoire alongside the recipes calling for the company's cocoa.