Birthday Cake
1¼ cups brown sugar Yolks 2 eggs 2/3 cup milk 2¼ cups flour 3½ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon orange extract 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 tablespoons Sherry 1/2 cup raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 1/2 cup walnut meats, cut in pieces 1/3 cup currants 2 tablespoons candied Whites 2 eggs orange peel, finely cut Follow directions for making butter-cake mixtures. Bake in a buttered and floured angel-cake pan in a slow oven one and one-quarter hours. Cover with Ornamental Frosting (see p. 532).
A fruited butter cake baked in a tube pan and finished with a stiff white icing. The method is assumed rather than spelled out, in the way Farmer's book cross-references its own standard procedures.
- "Butter-cake mixtures"The book's standard order of work: cream the butter, add sugar gradually, beat in the egg yolks, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Fruit and nuts are often dredged in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink, though this recipe does not say so.
- A slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; in modern terms roughly 300-325F. At an hour and a quarter in a deep tube pan a low oven suits a batter this heavy with fruit; a hotter oven sets the crust before the centre is done.
- Angel-cake panA plain ungreased-by-tradition tube pan, but here it is deliberately buttered and floured because a butter cake needs the release. A 9- or 10-inch tube pan is the modern equivalent; a bundt pan works but the fluting makes the icing awkward.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin, not fresh red currants. They are still sold under that name.
- Candied orange peelBuy whole candied peel and cut it yourself if you can; pre-diced mixed peel is a blend rather than the orange peel the recipe specifies.
- SherryTwo tablespoons is a flavouring, not a soaking. A medium or cream sherry suits the fruit better than a dry fino.
- Ornamental FrostingFarmer's ornamental frosting is a royal icing: egg white beaten with sifted confectioners' sugar until it holds a line, spread on a completely cold cake. It sets hard and is what allows the piped birthday lettering.
- Baking powderThe quantity as printed is unclear and appears garbled. For roughly two and a quarter cups of flour, something in the region of three teaspoons would be plausible; treat any larger figure with suspicion.
- YieldNo yield is given; a single tube cake of this size would serve roughly twelve to sixteen. A fruited cake of this kind keeps for several days wrapped.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's cake chapter is organised around a small number of base mixtures, and this is a decorated variant of the plain butter cake: the same creamed foundation carrying raisins, currants, walnuts, candied peel and sherry, which by 1896 was the standard American vocabulary for a cake meant to mark an occasion. The tube pan matters more than it looks. Farmer's book was written for the era when the reliable domestic oven was arriving, and a central tube let heat reach the middle of a dense, fruit-laden batter that would otherwise stay raw at the core through a long slow bake. Ornamental frosting, hard-drying and pipeable, is what turns the cake into a birthday cake at all; the practice of writing a name or setting candles on an iced cake is generally traced to German Kinderfeste customs carried into American households through the nineteenth century.