Sunshine Cake
3 tablespoons shortening 3/4 cup sugar yolks of 3 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring extract 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Cream shortening; add sugar gradually, and yolks of eggs which have been beaten until thick; add flavoring; sift together flour and baking powder and add alternately, a little at a time, with the milk to first mixture. Bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven 35 to 45 minutes. Cover with white icing. NOTE--This is an excellent cake to make in combination with the following Three-Egg Angel Cake. Only three eggs are required for both.
A small yolk-rich butter cake from a baking powder company's pamphlet, designed to be baked alongside a white-only cake so nothing is wasted. A few conversions and one leavening adjustment are all it needs.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is usually read as about 350F (some sources put it as high as 375F). A single loaf of this size is done in 35 to 45 minutes, when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour, or 2 teaspoons per cup, is heavy by current standards, where 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup is usual. Royal at the time was a cream of tartar powder, which releases its gas quickly in the bowl rather than in two stages; 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of modern powder should give ample rise without the bitter aftertaste and coarse crumb that over-leavening produces.
- ShorteningHere shortening means a solid fat: lard, vegetable shortening or butter. Butter gives the best flavour; use 3 tablespoons softened. The recipe adds no salt, so salted butter does no harm.
- FlourThe recipe specifies only "flour." Soft, lower-protein flour suits a cake like this, so use cake flour if you have it, or replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- Flavoring extractLeft unspecified; vanilla or lemon would have been the likely choices. One teaspoon of vanilla, or half vanilla and half lemon, suits a yolk cake well.
- The hingeThe yolks must be beaten "until thick" -- pale and ribbony, noticeably increased in volume. That aeration helps lighten the crumb, though with three teaspoons of baking powder in the formula most of the lift comes from the powder.
- Pan and yieldA greased loaf pan of about 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches is right for this quantity; line the base with parchment as well. It yields a small loaf, roughly eight to ten slices.
- The paired recipeThe note refers to using the three whites in the following angel cake. Whites keep three or four days covered in the refrigerator, or freeze well, so the two cakes need not be baked the same afternoon.
Sunshine cake is usually described as the yolk counterpart to angel food: one cake takes the whites, the other the yolks, so between them a cook used the whole egg. Sunshine cake was more often a sponge, leavened chiefly by beaten eggs and baked in a tube pan, and recipes of that sort were circulating in American cookbooks by the late nineteenth century. What is printed here is a creamed butter loaf lifted with baking powder -- the kind of formula a pamphlet published to sell Royal Baking Powder would want on the page. Books of this kind were given away with the tin and by mail in the early decades of the twentieth century, and they habitually name the brand in the ingredient list, a habit worth remembering when judging the quantities.