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My Favorite Cake
12 eggs. 1/2 lb. butter. 1 cup milk. 1 lb. flour. 1 lb. sugar. 5 level teaspoons baking powder. Lemon, orange and vanilla.
This is a formula rather than a set of directions — Mrs. Wilson assumed her reader knew how a butter cake goes together. The proportions are a lightened pound cake, and everything hinges on how you handle twelve eggs' worth of liquid.
- Weights to cupsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, sifted and spooned in; one pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Half a pound of butter is two sticks. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the ratio of flour to eggs is what keeps the batter from breaking.
- That is a very large cakeTwelve eggs, a pound of flour and a pound of sugar make roughly 2 quarts of batter — one large tube pan, two 9-inch loaves, or about two dozen cupcakes. Halving the recipe (6 eggs, 8 oz each flour and sugar, 1 stick butter, 1/2 cup milk, 2 1/2 tsp baking powder) is sensible for one cake.
- Method impliedCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs a few at a time, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. With this many eggs, add them slowly or the emulsion curdles; if it does, a spoonful of the flour brings it back.
- The flavorings"Lemon, orange and vanilla" is left entirely to the cook. The grated zest of one lemon and one orange plus 1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla suits the full quantity; if using extracts rather than zest, about a teaspoon of each is enough.
- Baking powderFive level teaspoons to a pound of flour works out to roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup, at the upper end of current practice, and the eggs are already doing much of the lifting. Four teaspoons for the full batch will not leave the crumb heavy.
- OvenThe formula gives no oven direction; a moderate oven of about 350F suits it. Loaves and tube cakes of this size need 50 to 65 minutes; layers 25 to 30. Test with a skewer in the deepest part, and tent the top with foil if it colors before the center sets.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal, and her cookbook carries the stamp of that work: brisk, economical, written for a household cook with scales in the kitchen. This cake is essentially a pound cake loosened up he weweights of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, and here the butter has been cut to half a pound, milk added, and chemical leavening brought in to make up the difference. That substitution, cheaper butter and eggs stretched by baking powder, is often said to be characteristic of American baking in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.