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Cocoanut Layer Cake
1¼ cups sugar 2 teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1¾ cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter 5 egg whites 2/3 cup milk Filling 1 scant cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 large tablespoon cornstarch Same method as Caramel Cream Cake.
Heat milk in double boiler, add enough grated cocoanut to make it stiff, then add beaten white of one egg. Frost with white frosting and put cocoanut all over cake.
This is a butter cake made by the standard creaming method, with a cornstarch-and-coconut filling between the layers. The text is a compressed advertising-booklet entry, so a few things need untangling before you start.
- The stray ingredient listThe trailing line — 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 cup cold water — belongs to no part of this cake and is almost certainly a fragment of the neighbouring recipe in the original page. Ignore it and work from the first list plus the filling.
- "Same method as Caramel Cream Cake"The cross-reference is not reproduced here, but it almost certainly points to the usual creaming sequence: cream the butter with the sugar, sift the flour with the baking powder, add it alternately with the milk, then fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites last. Fold rather than stir, so the air in the whites survives.
- Calumet Baking PowderA phosphate-type double-acting powder, and the reason this booklet exists. Two teaspoons of any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes directly for the two teaspoons called for.
- CocoanutSimply coconut in period spelling. "Grated cocoanut" here means unsweetened desiccated or freshly grated coconut, not the sweetened flake sold today; sweetened flake will make the filling cloying and the sugar in the filling is already measured for unsweetened.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given. Bake in two 9-inch or three 8-inch greased layer pans at 350F, 22 to 28 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- The filling is a cornstarch puddingWhisk the cornstarch and sugar into the cold milk before heating, or it will lump in the double boiler. Cook until it is thick enough to mound on a spoon, then stir in coconut until stiff.
- The egg white in the fillingAdd the beaten white to the hot filling still over the double boiler and cook two to three minutes more, stirring, so it sets rather than staying raw and slack. Cool the filling completely before spreading, or it will slide out from between the layers.
- White frostingIn a book of this vintage this most often means a boiled frosting — sugar syrup beaten into egg white — which is what holds a heavy coat of coconut; an uncooked white icing is also possible. A modern seven-minute frosting is close enough to stand in. Press the coconut on while the frosting is still tacky.
- YieldOne two- or three-layer cake, 10 to 12 servings.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, a firm generally traced to William Monroe Wright's founding of it in 1889; the recipes name the brand, which was the whole point of giving the book away. Coconut layer cake belongs to a distinctly American late-nineteenth-century fashion: once desiccated coconut began arriving in tins and packets, cooks no longer had to crack and grate a whole nut, and coconut is often said to have spread into cake fillings, custards and pies in this period. The white cake beneath it — egg whites only, no yolks — was prized for its pale crumb, and pairing it with white boiled frosting and a snowfall of coconut produced the sort of showpiece a baking powder maker was happy to have associated with its tin.