Daisy Cake
One cup sugar, 1 large tbsp. butter, 1 cup flour, 1½ tsp. Royal baking powder, 3/4 cup sweet milk, whites of two eggs, 1 tsp. vanilla. Cream butter and sugar, add flour and baking powder, which has been sifted three times, add milk and vanilla, last fold in the beaten egg whites. Frosting: Beat the yolks and add confectioner's sugar to make stiff, 1/2 tsp. butter and a little lemon juice or lemon extract.
— Mrs. C. W. Illingworth
A single-layer white butter cake from the era when a recipe assumed you knew your own stove. The batter is straightforward; the frosting is not, and it is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The frosting is uncooked egg yolkTwo raw yolks beaten with confectioner's sugar and a little lemon juice are never heated at any point, and the acid in lemon juice does not pasteurize anything. Raw yolk spread on a cooled cake and left at room temperature is a straightforward salmonella risk; use a current frosting recipe instead.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. No substitution needed.
- Royal baking powderA brand name given because leaveners were not interchangeable at the time: some were tartrate-based, others alum or phosphate, and results varied by tin. Any modern double-acting baking powder should work at the same 1 1/2 teaspoons.
- Sifting three timesNot simply fussiness. Flour was less uniform than it is now, and repeated sifting helped distribute the baking powder through it. One or two passes through a sieve with modern flour should do the same job.
- No oven, no pan, no timeThe recipe specifies none. For a cake of this size, one 8-inch round or square layer at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes is a reasonable modern starting point. The batter is thin for its volume, so a deep pan risks underbaking in the centre.
- Butter measured by the spoon'One large tbsp.' is probably somewhere around 1 ounce, roughly 2 level tablespoons by modern measure. Either way this is a lean cake, and it will be tender rather than rich.
- YieldOne thin layer; perhaps eight small squares or wedges.
The name may come from the colour scheme rather than any ingredient: a white cake made with egg whites alone, crowned with a yellow icing made from the leftover yolks — a daisy, petals and centre. Recipes built this way answered a real household problem, since a cook who used whites for a cake was left holding yolks with no refrigeration to store them in. The Philathea Cook Book belongs to a specific institution: Philathea classes were women's Bible classes attached to Sunday schools in the early twentieth century, and their members compiled and sold recipe collections to fund class work. The contribution here is signed by Mrs. C. W. Illingworth.