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ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR CAKE (Measure Cake)
1 cup butter or shortening 2 cups sugar 3 cups flour 4 eggs 3 teaspoons baking-powder 1 cup milk Flavoring Cream the butter or shortening and sugar, add eggs. Mix and sift flour and baking-powder and add alternately with the milk. Flavor as desired. Bake as loaf or layer cake at 380-400 degrees F. for twenty to forty-five minutes.
A butter cake built on a mnemonic: one butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs. The proportions are sound, but the single temperature range covers two very different pans and needs splitting.
- Choose the temperature to fit the panThe 380-400F range suits layers, which are shallow and set quickly; 375F for 25 to 30 minutes works well. A loaf or tube cake at that heat will darken before the center sets, so drop to 350F and expect 45 to 55 minutes.
- FlourMeasure the 3 cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, not scooping, or the cake turns dry. The recipe specifies only 'flour'; cake flour gives a finer crumb, all-purpose a sturdier one.
- Eggs whole, not separatedUnlike many cakes of the period, this one takes all four eggs into the creamed butter without whipping the whites separately. Add them one at a time and beat until each disappears before the next.
- Creaming is the leaveningCreaming -- The 3 teaspoons of baking powder to 3 cups of flour is a standard full measure, but air beaten into the butter and sugar also contributes lift. Cream thoroughly with butter at cool room temperature, until pale and visibly increased in volume.
- Alternating the flour and milkBegin and end with the dry mixture, in three additions of flour and two of milk, and mix only until the streaks vanish. Overworking after the milk goes in develops gluten and toughens the crumb.
- Flavoring"Flavor as desired" is left open. About 2 teaspoons vanilla, or 1 teaspoon each of vanilla and almond, or the grated zest of a lemon rubbed into the sugar all suit the batter.
- YieldThe batter is enough for three 8-inch layers, a 10-inch tube pan, or two loaf pans; two 9-inch rounds will be generously filled. Figure 12 to 16 servings.
- TestingJudge by a skewer coming out clean and the cake pulling slightly from the sides rather than by the clock; the twenty-to-forty-five-minute span presumably covers the difference between the loaf and the layers.
The one-two-three-four cake is one of the memory recipes of American home baking, printed in cookbooks from the nineteenth century onward. The name is the recipe: cups of butter, sugar and flour in ascending order, then four eggs, and its subtitle here, "Measure Cake," points to the same idea. Cakes of this proportion sit between pound cake, which used equal weights of the four ingredients and no chemical leavening, and the lighter milk-and-baking-powder cakes of the early twentieth century.