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Daisy White Cake No. 4
6 whites. 3 cups flour. 1 cup sweet milk. 1 3/4 cups sugar. 3/4 cup butter. 3 teaspoons baking powder.
Webb's vanilla and orange flavor. Bake in two layers.
A bare-bones list of the kind a newspaper column printed when it assumed every reader knew how to build a butter cake. The proportions are sound; the method has to be supplied.
- The missing methodCream the butter with the sugar until pale and light, add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. Beating the whites in rather than folding is the usual way this cake goes dense.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that older recipes call for when soda is the leavening. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Webb's vanilla and orange flavorApparently a proprietary flavoring of the period; it is not a brand that survives, and nothing more about it can be established from the recipe. About 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract with 1/2 teaspoon orange extract, or the grated zest of one orange, approximates the effect.
- Egg whitesSix large whites is roughly 3/4 cup and works here. Save the yolks for a custard or a gold cake; white-cake and yolk-cake recipes were often printed near one another for that reason.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for three cups of flour is standard. Modern double-acting powder is stronger than some early tartrate powders, so measure level rather than heaped or the crumb will be coarse and taste faintly metallic.
- FlourCake flour, sifted before measuring, is closer to the soft winter-wheat flour assumed here. All-purpose will work but gives a tighter crumb; remove two tablespoons per cup and replace with cornstarch if you want to approximate.
- Pans and ovenTwo greased and floured 8- or 9-inch round pans. The original's 'bake in two layers' is the whole of the instruction: no temperature, no time. As a modern starting point, 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- YieldOne two-layer cake serving 10 to 12. It takes a plain boiled or seven-minute white icing better than buttercream.
White cakes became a household staple only once refined white sugar, fine soft-wheat flour and reliable chemical baking powder were all cheap and available together, which is to say the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Making a cake with whites alone was a small display of that abundance: the crumb was pale and fine, and the six leftover yolks were expected to go straight into a gold cake, a custard or salad dressing, so nothing was wasted. Recipes of this kind were often gathered in dozens of near-identical variants, numbered rather than distinguished, which is why a "No. 4" exists at all. The name "Daisy" was a common period label for a white or white-and-yellow cake.