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Orange Layer Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2/3 cup milk 1 3/4 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Cream shortening; add sugar and yolks of eggs; cream well and add half the milk; add half the flour which has been sifted with the baking powder; mix in flavoring, milk and remainder of flour. Bake in two greased layer cake tins in moderate oven about 20 minutes. Spread between layers and on top the following orange filling and icing:
FILLING AND ICING whites of 2 eggs 1 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar juice, rind and soft pulp of 1 orange Whip eggs to stiff froth; add sugar, a little at a time; whip in the pulp, juice and rind of orange.
A standard American butter-style layer cake from a baking powder company's promotional book, with an uncooked meringue-style icing. Two things need attention: the oven and the leavening.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is conventionally read as about 350F. The recipe says about 20 minutes; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- ShorteningIn this period shortening could mean any solid fat: lard, butter, or the newer vegetable shortenings. Butter gives the best flavour with orange; use it softened, not melted.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is heavier than current practice, which runs 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup. Royal's powder was a cream-of-tartar type that acted on wetting rather than in the oven. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder is enough.
- The eggs are splitThe cake takes only the two yolks; the two whites go into the icing. Read both halves before you start cracking eggs.
- Mixing orderThe alternating additions of milk and flour are the point of the method: they keep the batter from breaking and limit gluten development. Add each in two goes and stop mixing as soon as the flour disappears.
- Raw egg white in the icingThe icing is never cooked. Use pasteurized egg whites, or make a cooked seven-minute frosting instead, if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immune-compromised.
- Icing consistencyThe juice and pulp of a whole orange is a lot of liquid for 1 1/2 cups of confectioner's sugar. Add the juice by the spoonful and expect to need more sugar to reach a spreadable icing; the grated rind carries most of the flavour anyway.
- YieldOne two-layer cake; the recipe does not state a tin size, but two 8-inch tins suit the quantity, giving roughly 10 slices. It keeps a day, covered; an uncooked icing of this kind may weep.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that shaped American home baking more than most cookbooks did: the free or near-free pamphlet issued by a manufacturer, in this case the Royal Baking Powder Company, whose cream-of-tartar powder competed hard against cheaper alum-phosphate rivals in the first decades of the twentieth century. The recipes name the brand, and the generous three teaspoons here might reasonably be read partly as advertising. The cake itself is the plain butter layer cake that anchored American home baking once chemical leavening made a reliable riser out of any cook; the orange was the variable part. Citrus arriving by rail from Florida and California made oranges an ordinary winter luxury by the 1920s, and a filling built from the juice, rind and pulp of a single fruit stretched one orange across a whole cake, rind included, in the frugal spirit these books took for granted.