Cup Cakes
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2_eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder 1½ cups flour 10 drops almond extract Milk (about 1/2 cup) Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs and beat until light; add sifted flour, baking powder, flavoring and milk to make a smooth batter, medium thick. Bake in well-greased cups or gem pans. 1/4 cup butter 3/4 cup sugar 1 egg
A plain creamed-butter cake batter baked in individual cups — the original sense of "cup cake" in American books of this period. The proportions are sound; only the equipment and the oven need translating.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was normal when ranges had no thermostat. Small butter cakes of this type want a moderate oven, 350F, for 18-22 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with rounded cups. An ordinary 12-cup muffin tin is the direct replacement; grease it well, since the recipe assumes no paper liners.
- FlourRead the flour as 1 1/2 cups. Period recipes commonly measured flour before sifting, though the phrase 'add sifted flour' does not settle the order either way; do not scoop from the bag, which packs in extra.
- The milk is deliberately vagueAbout 1/2 cup, added last and by eye, to bring the batter to "medium thick" — thick enough to mound on a spoon but to settle level in the cup. Flour absorbency varies, so hold back a little and judge the batter rather than the measure.
- Almond extractTen drops is on the order of 1/8 teaspoon. Modern extracts are strong and consistent; much more than that will dominate the whole batch.
- CreamingThe hinge of the method is beating the butter and sugar until genuinely pale and aerated, then the eggs until light. This batter has no other lift beyond the baking powder, so the air you beat in is the crumb.
- YieldExpect 10-12 standard cupcakes. They are unfrosted as written and are better eaten the day they are baked.
In nineteenth-century American baking, "cup cake" meant a cake measured by the cupful rather than weighed — the companion to pound cake, which took its name from a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Only later did the term shift to mean the small individual cake, and this entry sits exactly on the hinge: it is measured in cups and baked in cups. The gem pan called for here was a fixture of the cast-iron era, sold by stove and hardware makers for muffins, popovers and small cakes, and its rounded cups gave a domed shape closer to a modern muffin than to a flat-topped cupcake.