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Golden Spice Cake
½ cup butter ½ cup brown sugar 1 egg Yolks 4 eggs ½ cup molasses ½ cup milk 2¼ cups flour 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon clove ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg Few grains cayenne Few gratings lemon rind Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg and yolks of eggs well beaten, molasses, milk, flour, mixed and sifted with spices, cayenne, and lemon rind. Bake in a moderate oven one hour, and cover with White Mountain Cream (see p. 528).
A soft molasses-and-spice butter cake from Fannie Farmer's cake chapter, leavened with soda against the acidity of molasses and brown sugar, and finished with a boiled marshmallow-style frosting. The quantities as printed need care before you begin.
- The measurements are unreliable as printedThe measurements look garbled as printed -- butter, brown sugar, molasses and milk are all given as the same figure, which is unlikely in a cake of this kind. A plausible reading, judging by similar butter-and-molasses cakes, is something like 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup molasses and 1/2 cup milk against the 2 1/4 cups flour, but that is a reconstruction, not the printed text. Treat the printed amounts as suspect rather than converting them literally.
- EggsThe line runs together as '1 egg Yolks 4 eggs': read it as one whole egg plus the yolks of four more. Beat them well before they go in, as instructed.
- Soda, not baking powderMolasses and brown sugar supply the acid that the soda reacts with, so there is no baking powder here and none is needed. Sift the soda thoroughly through the flour with the spices; a lump of soda in molasses batter leaves a soapy brown streak.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read today as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperature. An hour at that heat would suit a single deep loaf or a 9-inch square pan; check at 45 minutes with a skewer, since molasses cakes brown before the centre is done.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is considerably more bitter than the molasses a recipe like this assumes and will overwhelm the spices.
- The cayenneNot a misprint; the recipe calls for a few grains. The usual explanation is that a trace of pepper lifts cinnamon and clove without reading as heat. Keep it to a pinch; more than that and the cake tastes of pepper.
- NutmegThe nutmeg quantity has lost its fraction. A quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, is in keeping with the clove and cinnamon here.
- White Mountain CreamThe cross-referenced frosting is a boiled sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg white, closer to seven-minute frosting than to buttercream. It must go onto a completely cool cake or it slides.
- YieldThe recipe specifies neither pan nor yield; baked as a single 9-inch square or a large loaf it would give roughly 10 to 12 servings.
Spice cakes built on molasses were the everyday cake of nineteenth-century New England kitchens, where molasses from the West Indies trade was cheaper and more constant in supply than refined white sugar. "Golden" here is often said to refer to the colour the yolks and brown sugar give, distinguishing it from the darker gingerbreads in the same chapter. The pinch of cayenne is generally traced to the habits of Fannie Farmer's era, when a trace of pepper is thought to have been used to sharpen sweet spices rather than to add heat. The pairing with White Mountain Cream, a boiled frosting named for the New Hampshire range, is a thoroughly regional finish and one the book returns to again and again.