Home › Small Confections › Little Cakes
Little Cakes
2 eggs whipped very light. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar creamed well with butter. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 2 cups flour with 2 teaspoons baking powder. Flavor with Webb's lemon or vanilla, mix well and bake in gem pans.
A plain creamed-butter cake batter baked in individual tins — what we would now call cupcakes. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- Gem pansGem pans were heavy cast-iron trays with shallow round or oval cups, the direct ancestor of the muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan, greased or lined, is the equivalent; fill each cup about two-thirds.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Small butter cakes of this composition want a moderate oven, 350–375°F, for 18–22 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- Sweet milk"Sweet" simply means fresh rather than soured or buttermilk — the distinction mattered when recipes might call for either and the leavening changed accordingly. Use whole milk.
- Webb's lemonNamed for a proprietary flavoring extract; the brand is now obscure. Any lemon or vanilla extract stands in; 1 teaspoon is right for this quantity of batter.
- Order of workThe instructions are compressed but the method is the standard one: cream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the whipped eggs, then add the milk and the sifted flour-and-baking-powder alternately. Do not overwork once the flour is in.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is one teaspoon per cup, in line with modern practice; no adjustment is needed.
- YieldAbout 12 to 18 cakes, depending on the size of the cups. They are unfrosted as written — a dusting of sugar, or a thin lemon glaze, suits them.
- Section headingThe page is filed under Vegetables, which is a quirk of the book's arrangement rather than anything to do with the cakes.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book gathers the domestic-science writing of Mary A. Wilson, who reached a national audience through the Ladies' Home Journal in the years around the First World War, when scientific cookery and standardized measuring cups were reshaping American home baking. "Little cakes" is a period catch-all for small individual cakes baked in gem pans, cast-iron trays that had been common in American kitchens since the mid-nineteenth century and were sold for everything from cornbread gems to sponge batters. The recipe's shape — chemical leavening, a bottled extract named by brand — is characteristic of the moment: an old creaming method fitted out with the packaged goods of an industrial pantry.