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Calumet Assorted Cake Squares
2 cups pastry flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 cup granulated sugar 1/4 cup butter cup milk Whites of 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Sift flour once, then measure; add baking powder; sift three times and set to one side. Cream butter and sugar, add milk and flour alternately and beat very hard. Fold in beaten whites. Bake in 2-inch square cake pan 30 to 35 minutes. When cool cut in squares and set away until icing is ready. Put icing (page 32) in bowl over teakettle and dip in squares. (See illustration, page 21.)
A plain white butter cake baked in a sheet, cut into cubes and dipped in warm icing — what a bakery would call petits fours. The recipe is written for cooks who already knew the house style, so several numbers are missing or abbreviated.
- The missing milk quantityThe original reads "cup milk" with the number dropped in printing. Something between 1/2 and 3/4 cup suits these proportions and will give a batter that ribbons off the spoon. Add it gradually and judge by the batter rather than committing all at once.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A butter cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F. At 30 to 35 minutes the center should spring back and a tester come out clean.
- "2-inch square cake pan"This most likely means a square pan two inches deep rather than a pan two inches across. Use an 8-inch or 9-inch square, greased and lined; the batter runs to about 4 cups and will fill an 8-inch pan to roughly an inch before it rises.
- Baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder, combining sodium aluminum sulfate with calcium acid phosphate. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one, so 2 level teaspoons stands.
- Pastry flourSift, then measure — the order matters, and it gives a lighter cup than scooping. If pastry flour is unavailable, use cake flour, or all-purpose with 2 tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch. The three siftings are not fussiness; along with the creaming and the beaten whites they are how this batter is aerated.
- Creaming without eggs in the batterOnly the whites go in, and they go in last as foam. "Beat very hard" applies to the flour-and-milk stage; once the whites are added, fold and stop. Overworking here is the usual cause of a tough, low square.
- The dipping icingThe icing itself is on a page not reproduced here. The bowl over the teakettle is a bain-marie, holding the icing at a pourable temperature; a fondant-style dipping icing is usually worked around 100-110F. It must stay thin enough to coat and drain; if it thickens as you work, warm it again and thin with a few drops of hot water rather than stirring hard, which dulls the finish.
- Chill and trim before dippingCool the cake completely, then refrigerate an hour before cutting. Cold, firm cake cuts to clean edges and sheds far fewer crumbs into the icing. Trim the crust from the top and sides so the icing meets crumb on all faces.
- YieldAn 8-inch square cut into 1 1/4-inch cubes gives about 36 squares. "Assorted" most likely refers to tinting and flavoring portions of the icing differently; the book refers you to an illustration on page 21.
Reliable Recipes was the promotional cookbook of the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which ran through many editions in the early twentieth century and existed to put the brand name into a home cook's hands several dozen times over — hence "2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder" rather than simply baking powder. The dish itself is the American household version of petits fours: a lean white cake, baked flat, cubed and enrobed in poured fondant, a technique borrowed from professional confectionery and simplified to a mixing bowl set over a singing teakettle. Level measurement and the sift-then-measure order were themselves a selling point of the period, generally traced to the domestic science movement and Fannie Farmer's insistence in the 1890s that recipes be reproducible rather than a matter of the cook's judgment. The "assorted" of the title is pure merchandising: one cake, one icing divided and colored, and a plateful that looks like it came from a bakery window.