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Cream Layer Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring extract 1/2 cup milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt Cream shortening and sugar together until light; add well beaten yolks of eggs and flavoring, and milk slowly; sift flour and salt; add half, then half of stiffly beaten whites of eggs and remainder of flour sifted with baking powder; stir after each addition; fold in remaining whites of eggs. Bake in greased layer cake tins in moderate oven, 15 to 20 minutes. Put together with cream filling and cover top and sides with white icing.
A straightforward two-layer butter cake from a baking powder company's promotional book, with the leavening dose set higher than modern practice. The technique is the part worth attention: the baking powder goes in with the last of the flour, so the batter should reach the oven quickly.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in this period generally covers roughly 350-375F. The recipe's own 15 to 20 minutes is the guide for thin layers; test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Pans"Layer cake tins" are shallow round tins; this quantity of batter suits two 8- or 9-inch pans, though the recipe does not say. Grease as directed, and line the bases with paper if you wish.
- Baking powder amountThree teaspoons for two cups of flour is high by modern standards. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, largely single-acting, so some of its lift was spent before the tin reached the oven; with modern double-acting powder you can reasonably cut this to about 2 to 2 1/4 teaspoons, which also avoids the metallic edge and coarse crumb of overleavening.
- Work fast at the endBecause the powder is added at the last stage along with the beaten whites, mix only until combined, divide between the pans and bake immediately. Batter left standing on the counter loses its lift.
- ShorteningIn a Royal book of this period the word covers butter, lard or vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour for a plain layer cake; modern vegetable shortening is aerated, so weighing it (about 100 g for the half cup) is more reliable than measuring by volume.
- Flavoring extractVanilla is the likeliest reading; lemon or almond were also used in cakes of this kind.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was generally softer than modern all-purpose. All-purpose works, but the crumb will be a little tougher; cake flour substituted by weight gives a result closer to the original.
- Filling and icingBoth would have been separate recipes elsewhere in the book; the page assumes them. "Cream filling" is generally a cooked milk-and-egg pastry cream; "white icing" may be a boiled sugar syrup beaten into egg white, or a plain uncooked white icing. Any modern pastry cream with Italian meringue or seven-minute icing will do. Fill and ice only once the layers are fully cold.
- YieldOne 8-inch two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings. Cakes filled with pastry cream should be kept refrigerated and eaten within two days.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and like all such booklets its purpose was to keep a specific tin on the kitchen shelf: note that the recipe names the brand rather than the ingredient. Royal's powder was cream-of-tartar based, and the company spent decades in loud public argument against cheaper alum-based rivals, insisting that alum in food was harmful. The plain layered butter cake, split, filled with cooked cream and sheathed in boiled white icing, was the standard American company cake of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is often said to have taken that form because chemical leavening had made a reliably light cake possible without yeast or an hour of beating eggs by hand. The dose of powder here is high.