Ice Cream Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup milk 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups sugar 3 cups flour Whites 4 eggs
This is a bare ingredient list in the compressed style Farmer used for cakes that follow the standard butter-cake method given earlier in the chapter. Everything the modern baker needs has to be reconstructed from the proportions.
- The butter figure looks wrongThree cups of flour, two of sugar and one of milk is a standard cup-cake framework that normally carries half a cup to one cup of butter. At 1½ cups the batter would be greasy and prone to splitting. Treat the quantity as suspect and work from ½ cup unless you want to test the printed version deliberately.
- The missing methodNo directions are printed with this entry. The standard treatment for a butter cake of these proportions is to cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then milk and sifted dry ingredients alternately, folding in the stiffly beaten whites last.
- Whites onlyFour whites and no yolks give a pale, close-grained white cake. The leftover yolks would commonly have gone into another dish, such as a custard, mayonnaise or gold cake.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to three cups of flour is on the heavy side by current standards; three teaspoons is nearer modern practice with today's double-acting powder.
- OvenNo oven instruction is printed. A cake of this type is usually baked in a moderate oven; around 350F suits it in a modern range, with layers taking roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- What "ice cream" means hereNothing is frozen. Cakes under this name in period books are generally layer cakes finished with a white boiled or confectioners' icing, and the name most likely refers to the icing; the entry itself specifies neither pans nor frosting.
- YieldEnough for about three 8-inch layers, serving 10 to 12.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) is remembered for insisting on level, standardised measurements, and cake entries reduced to a bare list of proportions depend on a general butter-cake method set out elsewhere. "Ice cream cake" in nineteenth-century American books often meant a white layer cake masked in a pale boiled icing; the explanation that the name comes from the icing's resemblance to frozen cream is a traditional one rather than a documented derivation, and cakes combining sponge or layers with actually frozen cream are also recorded. White cakes of this kind used whites only, and the leftover yolks were commonly worked into another dish.