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Maple Layer Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 cup milk 2 cup milk 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt Cream shortening and sugar; add yolks of eggs and flavoring; mix well; add milk slowly, stirring until smooth; sift flour, baking powder and salt together; add half to mixture, then half of stiffly-beaten whites of eggs, then the rest of flour (stirring after each addition); fold in balance of whites. Pour into greased layer cake tins and bake in moderate oven about 12 or 15 minutes. For middle layer of chocolate, take 1-3 of the batter of the above recipe and add 1 oz. melted chocolate. Put together with maple icing I.
A plain butter cake built for the baking-powder company that published the book, with a chocolate middle layer split off from the same batter. A few points in the ingredient list need sorting before you start.
- Milk quantityThe printed page was checked and the milk measure is what our text now gives. Use 1/2 cup, added slowly to the creamed mixture, against 2 cups flour and 1/2 cup shortening.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons was normal for the single-acting powders of the period. With modern double-acting baking powder, 2 teaspoons is enough for 2 cups of flour; the full three will give a coarse crumb and a faint metallic edge.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Thin layers at 12 to 15 minutes is plausible at that temperature, so check at 12 rather than trusting the upper figure.
- ShorteningIn 1920s usage this means any solid fat, including butter, lard or the newer hydrogenated vegetable shortenings the book was contemporary with. Butter gives the better flavour against maple icing; creaming it with the sugar for a full three minutes matters more than which fat you pick.
- PansThree round layer tins, since the recipe wants a chocolate middle. If you have only two pans, bake the plain batter as two layers and skip the chocolate variation rather than crowding one tin.
- The chocolate thirdOne ounce of melted unsweetened chocolate into a third of the batter. Let it cool to barely warm before folding it in or it will deflate the beaten whites already in the mixture.
- Folding orderThe alternation of flour and whites is the hinge here. Besides the creaming and the powder, the whites carry the aeration, so fold, do not stir, once they are in, and get the batter into the pans immediately.
- Maple icing"Maple icing I" is a separate entry in the same book, typically a boiled maple syrup or maple-sugar syrup beaten into egg white. Any maple boiled-icing or maple buttercream will serve; you need enough for two internal layers plus the top.
- YieldOne three-layer cake, twelve to sixteen slices.
The New Royal Cook Book was promotional literature: Royal Baking Powder Company booklets named their own product in the ingredient list of nearly every recipe, and the leavening quantities reflect what their single-acting cream-of-tartar powder could do rather than what a modern tin requires. The maple flavouring points to the northeastern United States and Canada, where maple sugar and syrup were the cheap domestic sweetener long before they became a delicacy, and boiled maple icings were a standard way to dress a plain layer cake. The trick of splitting off a third of the batter for a chocolate middle layer belongs to the same thrifty impulse and gives two-tone colours on the cut face, which is a "ribbon" cake effect that appears under many names in American books of the period.