Spanish Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 3/4 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 cup milk Cream shortening; add sugar and yolks of eggs; beat well; sift together flour, baking powder and cinnamon and add alternately with milk; fold in beaten whites of eggs. Bake in greased pan in moderate oven 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with boiled icing.
A plain cinnamon butter cake from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew what a cake batter should look like. Two things need translating: the oven and the leavening.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. At that temperature 35 to 40 minutes suits a single 8-inch square or round pan; two thin 8-inch layers will be done in 22 to 25 minutes.
- The baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder, which releases most of its gas as soon as it is wet rather than in a second burst in the oven. Three teaspoons in 1 3/4 cups flour is generous by modern measure; 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of a current double-acting powder should give comparable lift.
- ShorteningIn this period the word usually means lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, though it was also used loosely for any fat, butter included. Butter works and tastes better, but the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Alternating flour and milkAdd the dry mixture in three parts and the milk in two, beginning and ending with flour, and stop mixing the moment each addition disappears. This is the hinge of the recipe: overworking after the milk goes in toughens a cake this lean.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft, not stiff, peaks. Stiff whites break into lumps that leave streaks of dry white in the baked crumb.
- Boiled icingThe period standard is sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F on a thermometer, poured in a thin stream into beaten egg whites and whipped until it holds a peak. Because the syrup only partly cooks the whites, use pasteurized whites if anyone eating is elderly, pregnant, or immune-compromised; a seven-minute frosting beaten over simmering water is the equivalent alternative.
- CinnamonOne teaspoon of pre-ground cinnamon sitting in a jar for a year will read as almost nothing. Use fresh ground, or increase slightly if yours is old.
- YieldAbout nine generous squares from an 8-inch pan, or one modest two-layer cake.
"Spanish cake" in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often has little to do with Spain; the name appears to have been applied loosely to plain cakes flavored with cinnamon, though the reason behind it is not documented. Names of the same kind, such as "Spanish buns" and "Spanish cream," turn up in the same period. The New Royal Cook Book was published by the makers of Royal Baking Powder, and its recipes are built to show what a chemically leavened cake could do at home without yeast or long beating. The boiled icing that finishes the cake was a common American frosting of the era, cheap, glossy, and made from little more than sugar and egg white.