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Calumet Checker-Board Cake
1 teaspoon vanilla Light Part 2 cups pastry flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1¼ cups granulated sugar 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup water teaspoon vanilla Whites of 4 eggs Cream butter and sugar, add water and dry ingredients alternately, then whites of eggs and beat hard. (See illustration, page 52.) Dark Part 3 2 cups pastry flour 1/2 cup water 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg 1 cup brown sugar Yolks of 4 eggs, well beaten 1/2 cup butter Lastly, 1 ounce of melted chocolate Sift flour once, then measure; add baking powder, and sift three times; cream butter and sugar; add yolks and beat hard, then flour and water alternately; put in square layer pans in strips, light and dark alternately, and place together dark to light. Icing One and one-half cups of confectioner's sugar, with just enough cream to spread; flavor with vanilla.
A two-batter cake from a baking powder company's promotional book, written for cooks who already knew how to fill a layer pan. The instructions are terse and the oven temperature is missing entirely; the checkerboard effect depends wholly on how you pipe the batters.
- The hinge: piping the stripsEach square pan is filled with alternating strips of light and dark batter running in one direction, and the baked layers are then stacked so dark sits over light. Pipe the batters from bags of equal width, or use strips of foil or a checkerboard pan insert as dividers; batter spooned loosely will bleed and the pattern disappears.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Layers of this size and richness bake at 350F, roughly 25 to 30 minutes for a square layer, until the centre springs back.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute cake flour straight across, or for each cup of all-purpose remove two tablespoons and replace them with cornstarch. Note that the dark part carries the sifting instruction -- sift once, then measure, then add the baking powder and sift three times -- and correct measuring by volume depends on it.
- Baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder combining sodium aluminium sulphate with acid phosphate. A modern double-acting powder is the closest substitute, though the release timing will not be identical. Two level teaspoons per two cups of flour is still a standard proportion.
- The missing vanilla quantityThe light part reads "teaspoon vanilla" with no number, presumably a printing error. One teaspoon is a reasonable amount for two cups of flour.
- One ounce of chocolateThis means one square of unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly before it goes in last. Semisweet will make the dark batter sweeter and softer; if you use it, cut the brown sugar a little.
- Whites and yolksThe light batter simply says to add the whites and beat hard, with no instruction to whip them first, in contrast to the yolks in the dark part, which are specified as well beaten. Taken at face value this gives a firm, close crumb rather than a foam cake.
- Icing quantityA cup and a half of confectioner's sugar with cream makes a thin glaze, enough to skim the top and sides of one stacked cake. Double it if you want to fill between layers as well.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither pan size nor yield. Two batters of two cups of flour each should fill roughly three or four 8-inch square pans, for a stacked cake serving in the region of twelve to sixteen.
Reliable Recipes was issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of many free or near-free cookbooks that leavening manufacturers put out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to promote their own tins. Recipes in such books routinely specify the brand by name, and the careful "level teaspoons" language reflects the era's push toward standardised measurement, generally traced to the domestic science movement and Fannie Farmer's insistence on level spoonfuls. The checkerboard cake itself belongs to a family of showpiece layer cakes -- marble, ribbon, harlequin -- that became easier for ordinary households once chemical leavening made reliable light and dark batters routine. The pattern is pure display: two batters, one spiced and chocolate, one plain, arranged so that a cut slice reveals a grid. The book here expects you to lay the strips by hand, and carries a cross-reference to an illustration on page 52.