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Feather Cocoanut Cake
1 1/2 cups flour 7/8 cup sugar 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 tablespoons shortening 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon lemon flavoring 1/2 cup grated cocoanut Sift flour, sugar and baking powder. Add melted shortening and beaten egg to milk and add to dry ingredients. Mix well, add flavoring and cocoanut and bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven 35 to 45 minutes. Before serving, sprinkle with a little powdered sugar, or if desired, ice with white icing with grated cocoanut sprinkled on top.
A plain one-egg loaf cake from a baking powder company pamphlet, built on the quick single-bowl method rather than creaming. Two details decide the result: the oven temperature and how briefly you stir.
- Moderate ovenSet it to 350F. At 35 to 45 minutes in a loaf pan, a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the top spring back; the lean batter dries out fast past that point.
- 7/8 cup sugarThat is one cup less two tablespoons, or about 175 g.
- Cocoanut"Grated" suggests fresh coconut, moist and unsweetened, though packaged shredded coconut was already on sale by this period. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the cake noticeably sweeter and drier; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the closer match, and worth soaking in a spoonful of the milk first.
- ShorteningTwo tablespoons is all the fat in the cake, so it is a firm, close-textured loaf rather than a rich one. Melted butter works in its place and improves the flavour; do not let it be hot enough to cook the egg when the two meet.
- MixingWet into dry, stirred just until no dry flour remains. "Mix well" here means combined, not beaten smooth -- overworking this batter after the baking powder is wetted gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Lemon flavoringThat means lemon extract, not juice. A teaspoon is a lot of extract by modern standards; half a teaspoon plus the zest of a lemon gives a cleaner result.
- Pan and yieldA standard 8 x 4 inch loaf tin holds this comfortably. It serves eight to ten in thin slices, and keeps better wrapped than in the open air.
The New Royal Cook Book was advertising literature: Royal Baking Powder printed it to put its own product into as many recipes as possible, which is why the leavening is named as a brand while the flour and sugar are not. "Feather" in a period cake title signals lightness, the quality chemical leavening was sold on, and cakes like this one -- one egg, two tablespoons of fat, mixed in minutes -- were the practical argument for baking powder over the long creaming and beaten-egg methods that preceded it. Coconut appears constantly in American cake books of the period, and grating a whole nut was work that packaged shredded coconut later took over.