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Marshmallow Cake
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs. 1/2 cup milk. 1½ cups flour Grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 teaspoons baking powder Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs, one at a time, then the milk, flour and flavoring, and last the baking powder. Beat thoroughly after adding each ingredient. Bake in layers and fill with marshmallow filling. 1 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup molasses
The text as printed is a fragment: the loose-leaf format has jumbled the ingredient column into the method, and at least two quantities are missing. Read it as a small molasses layer cake rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives flour, baking powder, nutmeg, vanilla, butter, sugar and molasses, but the method calls for eggs and milk that never appear in the column. For a cake built on 1 1/2 cups flour and 1/3 cup butter, two eggs and about 1/2 cup milk is the proportion the period would expect — but the original genuinely does not say, so treat it as a reconstruction.
- Two sweetenersHalf a cup of sugar plus half a cup of molasses makes this a mildly spiced molasses cake, darker and moister than a plain layer cake. Modern unsulphured molasses is generally milder than the older sulphured product; blackstrap will overwhelm the nutmeg.
- Baking powder lastThe instruction to add it at the very end is deliberate and worth following. Older baking powders began reacting on contact with liquid, so the leavening went in immediately before the pans. It does no harm with modern double-acting powder, but sift it with a little of the flour so it distributes.
- Do not beat thoroughly after the flour"Beat thoroughly after adding each ingredient" belongs to the butter, sugar and eggs. Once the flour is in, fold only until combined; extended beating at that stage builds gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Pans and ovenThe book gives neither pan size nor oven heat. As a modern working guide, two 8-inch rounds at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean; the molasses browns fast, so judge by the centre rather than the colour. Because the egg and milk quantities are missing, how far the batter fills the pans is guesswork.
- Marshmallow filling'Fill with marshmallow filling' points to a filling recipe given elsewhere in the book; it is not on this page. Period marshmallow fillings were typically a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white, sometimes with gelatin. Any modern seven-minute frosting or marshmallow creme filling stands in for it. Fill and frost only when the layers are fully cold or the filling slides.
- YieldA two-layer 8-inch cake, eight to ten slices.
Marshmallow fillings and frostings were a fashion of the first decades of the twentieth century, when commercial marshmallows and cheap powdered gelatin made a glossy white filling something an ordinary household could produce without confectioner's skill. The name reaches back to the marsh mallow, Althaea officinalis, whose mucilaginous root was once boiled with sugar to make a soothing lozenge; by the time this book was printed gelatin and beaten egg white did all the work. The odd, spliced state of this page is an artifact of transcription: Mrs. Fryer's book was issued as loose leaves, and ingredient columns set beside the method have a habit of collapsing into it when such a page is transcribed.