Fairmount Cake
4 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 cup shortening 2 1/2 cups sugar 1 cup sweet milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 6 eggs chopped cocoanut Sift flour and baking powder at least three times; beat shortening and sugar to a cream; add milk and vanilla extract, then flour and baking powder, a little at a time; beat until smooth; add eggs one at a time, stirring and beating batter well after each egg is put in. Bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven 1 1/2 hours. When cold cover top with boiled icing and sprinkle with chopped cocoanut.
A large, plain butter-cake of the kind baked by the panful for company teas, dressed up with boiled icing and coconut. The batter is roughly double a standard loaf, and that is where most modern failures start.
- Pan sizeFour cups of flour and six eggs is far too much batter for one modern 9x5-inch loaf pan; it will dome, crack and run over. Divide between two loaf pans, or bake in a 10-inch tube pan, and fill no more than two-thirds full.
- Moderate ovenConventionally glossed as about 350F, though period usage ranges from roughly 325 to 375F. For a cake this deep, 325F is safer over the long bake; test with a skewer from about 55 minutes for divided pans, and expect closer to the full 1 1/2 hours only for a single large tube pan.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The term exists only to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which would call for soda instead of baking powder.
- ShorteningIn a Royal Baking Powder book this means any solid fat — butter, lard or a vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour; if you use modern vegetable shortening the crumb will be softer and blander.
- The mixing orderMilk and flour go in before the eggs, which is backwards by modern habit and will look curdled and stiff at the halfway point. That is expected: the six eggs beaten in one at a time are what smooth and lighten it, so give each one a genuine 30 seconds of beating.
- SiftingThree siftings of flour with the baking powder is not fussiness in a cake with no chemical leavening beyond those four teaspoons. It distributes the powder evenly and aerates soft flour that came unsifted from a sack; two passes through a sieve does the job today.
- CocoanutThis may mean fresh coconut grated at home, though packaged desiccated and shredded coconut was widely sold by the time this booklet appeared. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flake will make an already sweet cake sweeter.
- Boiled icingA hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites, close kin to the seven-minute frosting of later books, though that one is beaten over boiling water rather than made with a poured syrup. It sets with a thin crust, so apply the coconut immediately while the surface is still tacky.
- YieldRoughly 20 to 24 servings. It keeps two or three days well wrapped, though boiled icing weeps after the first day.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets the Royal Baking Powder Company distributed in enormous numbers in the early twentieth century, and it does the work such books were meant to do: a showy, egg-rich cake whose rise is credited entirely to four teaspoons of the sponsor's product. Cakes in these collections were routinely named for parks, hotels, streets and towns, though the booklets never explain their names. The coconut topping marks it as a special-occasion cake rethat that arrived in American kitchens in quantity only after steamship trade with the Caribbean made whole nuts cheap, with commercially desiccated coconut on the American market from the 1860s-70s onward.