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Caramel Cream Cake
2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter ½ cup milk 1/2 Whites of 4 eggs 1 teaspoon of vanilla Sift flour, then measure; add baking powder, and sift three times. Cream sugar and butter thoroughly, add flavor, then flour and milk alternately; lastly add the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in two layers 25 to 30 minutes. 1 cup sour cream Caramel Filling 1 cup sugar 1 cup nut meats, chopped Cook together until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water; take from fire and stir until cool.
The typesetting in this Calumet promotional booklet has scrambled the ingredient column, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- The missing flourThe milk was checked against the printed page and reads half a cup, as our text now gives. No flour quantity is stated anywhere in the recipe; two cups of sifted cake flour suits the other proportions. Hold back a little of the milk until you see how the batter comes together.
- Sift, then measureThis is not decoration. Flour settled hard in the barrel or sack, and sifting first and measuring after gives noticeably less flour per cup than scooping -- somewhere in the region of 15 percent. If you weigh instead, 2 cups sifted cake flour is about 200 g, though the recipe does not say what flour to use.
- Baking powderCalumet was a double-acting phosphate-and-alum powder, and 2 level teaspoons for 2 cups of flour is still the standard ratio. Any modern double-acting baking powder works one for one.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. In a modern oven, 350F for the stated 25 to 30 minutes suits two 8-inch layers; the recipe does not specify pan size, and shallower 9-inch layers will be done sooner, so check early.
- Creaming the butter"Cream sugar and butter thoroughly" means several minutes with the butter at cool room temperature, until pale and visibly increased in volume. With only whipped whites and baking powder for lift, the air beaten in here is most of the cake's structure.
- Folding the whitesBeat the four whites to soft-firm peaks, not dry. Fold them in in two additions with a spatula; stirring them through deflates the batter and gives a dense, gummy layer.
- The filling is the hingeSour cream, sugar and nuts cooked to the soft-ball stage, in the manner of a boiled fudge. Soft ball is 235-240F on a candy thermometer, which is easier to judge than the cold-water test. The recipe says to take it from the fire and stir until cool; beating it while still very hot encourages graining, so let it lose some heat first.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream would generally have been naturally soured cream, likely thinner and richer than today's cultured tubs. Commercial full-fat sour cream works; low-fat versions often carry stabilizers and can break over heat.
- YieldTwo layers, roughly 10 slices if you use 8-inch pans; the recipe does not say. The filling makes enough for between the layers and a thin top; double it if you want the sides covered.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of many branded booklets that circulated in American kitchens after 1900 to encourage cooks to reach for a tin rather than a jar of saleratus and a cup of sour milk. The give-away is in the ingredient list itself, where the brand name is printed where a plain recipe would simply say "baking powder." The cake is a standard white layer cake of the period, leavened with beaten whites and chemical powder together, and the caramel filling is a boiled sugar-and-dairy confection of a kind common in period cookbooks. The sour cream's acid gives the finished filling a tang that plain caramel lacks.