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Sunshine Cake
1/2 cup of butter 1½ cups granulated sugar 2½ cups flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon lemon Yolks of 9 eggs 1 cup water Cream butter and sugar thoroughly, beat eggs and add to butter and sugar. Sift flour before measuring, then sift flour and baking powder together three times, and add alternately with milk to other ingredients. Bake in a slow oven 50 to 60 minutes.
A yellow butter cake built on nine egg yolks, from a baking-powder company's promotional booklet. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start: the liquid and the oven.
- Water or milkThe ingredient list says 1 cup of water; the method says to add the flour alternately with "milk." One of the two is a printing slip, and there is no way to tell which. Either works; milk will give a softer crumb and more browning.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is 300-325F. Fifty to sixty minutes at that temperature suits a deep tube or loaf pan; in two 8-inch layers the cake will be done in 25-30 minutes and will dry out if held for the full hour.
- Garbled fractionsThe run-together numerals are typesetting artifacts. Read them as 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder combining sodium aluminum sulfate with acid phosphate, and any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes at the same 2 level teaspoons. The insistence on "level" is standard in booklets of this kind, where a heaped spoon could carry noticeably more.
- 1 teaspoon lemonThis is shorthand for lemon extract rather than juice or zest. Strengths varied then as now, so taste the batter and adjust rather than assuming a straight swap.
- FlourSift before measuring, as instructed. Period household flour was often softer than modern all-purpose, so if you have cake flour it may be the nearer match; sift, spoon into the cup, and level.
- The yolksNine yolks are the whole point of the cake, and such recipes are often said to have served as a use for yolks left over from angel food. Beat them until thick and pale before adding, and plan on a use for the nine whites the same day.
- YieldAbout a 9-inch tube pan or two 8-inch layers, 10 to 12 servings. The crumb is close and rich rather than airy, and it takes a plain lemon glaze well.
Reliable Recipes was one of a long line of booklets issued by baking-powder manufacturers, and the brand name printed into the ingredient list is the reason the book exists: recipes were the advertising. The name Sunshine Cake is generally traced to the late nineteenth century, attaching to cakes colored yellow by egg yolks, and it was usually the partner of angel food, which used only whites. The version here is unusual in being a butter cake rather than a foam cake; many contemporary Sunshine Cakes fold beaten whites back in and use no butter at all, which suggests the name traveled faster than any fixed formula for it.