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Bridge Cake
4 1/2 cups sugar 6 cups flour 3 tablespoons baking powder 1 cup margarine 3 teaspoons vanilla 1 1/2 cups milk 12 eggs 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Mix as for cake, adding beaten egg yolks and whites separately. Divide in two parts, adding vegetable coloring to one part. Bake in greased loaf pans, moderate oven (350 degrees) 45 minutes. When cold, cut slices from each colored cake, matching contrasting slices. Cut with fancy cookie cutter through these two slices, spreading cut edges carefully with one egg white beaten with 3 tablespoons sugar. Insert cut--out section into slice of opposite color.
This is a party-scale butter cake built for a single trick: two loaves of contrasting color, sliced and inlaid so each slice carries a cut-out shape of the other color. The batter is straightforward; all the difficulty is in the cutting.
- ScaleAs written this is six cups of flour and a dozen eggs — enough batter for two large loaves or more, and a great many finished slices. Halving it (3 cups flour, 6 eggs, and so on) still gives you one loaf of each color, which is all the pattern requires.
- Oven350F is correct as stated. Large loaves at that temperature often need longer than 45 minutes; start testing at 45 and expect up to an hour for full-size pans. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides.
- The hinge: cut cold, ideally staleFresh cake tears and crumbles under a cutter. Bake a day ahead, wrap, and cut when thoroughly cold — an hour in the refrigerator or twenty minutes in the freezer firms the crumb enough for clean edges. Slices should be a generous half-inch and identical in thickness, or the swapped cut-outs will sit proud or sunken.
- Matching the slicesCut both loaves to the same width and press the cutter straight down through the two stacked slices at once, exactly as directed. Cutting them separately guarantees the shapes will not interchange.
- MargarinePeriod margarine was generally a firm, plain-flavored fat, often hydrogenated vegetable oil. Use a stick margarine or unsalted butter, well softened; tub spreads carry too much water for a creamed batter.
- Vegetable coloringModern gel colors are far stronger than the liquid dyes of the period. Add a little at a time to one half of the batter and remember that pink and green both dull as the cake bakes and browns, so tint slightly deeper than you want the finished crumb.
- The egg-white pasteOne white beaten with 3 tablespoons sugar makes a thin uncooked meringue used purely as glue on the cut edges. It is never baked, so use pasteurized egg white if that matters to you, and apply it sparingly — too much soaks the crumb and the inlay slips.
- ServingOne slice per person, served the day they are assembled. Assembled slices dry out quickly at the cut edges; keep them covered until serving.