Imperial Cake
1/2 lb. butter 1/2 lb. sugar Yolks 5 eggs Whites 5 eggs Grated rind 1/2 lemon 2 teaspoons lemon juice ½ lb. raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 1/2 cup walnut meat, broken in pieces 1/2 lb. flour ¼ teaspoon soda Mix same as Pound Cake, adding raisins dredged with flour, and nuts at the last.
This is a fruited pound cake, and almost all the technique lives in the phrase "mix same as Pound Cake." The proportions are given by weight, which is how cake was reliably made before standard measuring cups.
- The hinge: pound-cake methodCream the butter and sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs a little at a time so the batter never breaks, then fold in the flour. All the lift in this cake comes from that aeration, not from the pinch of soda.
- Weights, not cups1/2 lb. flour is about 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled; 1 1/2 lb. raisins is roughly 4 1/2 to 5 cups. Weighing is faster and truer here than converting.
- Soda quantityThe soda figure as printed is not a usable amount. In a creamed pound-cake batter of this size, soda is a token addition only, and the cake will rise perfectly well without it.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the cut raisins in a little of the measured flour before folding them in keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Take the dredging flour from the 1/2 lb., not in addition to it.
- Nuts lastWalnuts folded in at the very end stay in pieces; beaten in earlier they break down and grey the crumb.
- OvenPound cakes of this density want a slow to moderate oven, 300 to 325F. A hot oven sets and browns the crust long before the middle cooks.
- Pan and timeBake in a well-buttered and papered loaf or tube pan, 1 to 1 1/2 hours depending on depth, until a skewer comes out clean. This much fruit makes a heavy cake that scorches easily, so tent the top with paper once it has coloured.
- KeepingWrapped closely, a cake this rich in fruit and butter improves over several days and will keep a couple of weeks in a cool place.
"Imperial" is often said to have been a nineteenth-century cake-name convention rather than a place or a person: like Queen Cake, Federal Cake and Election Cake, it is generally taken to have signalled richness and expense. The base is the old English pound cake, equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, loaded here with a pound and a half of seeded raisins, and the seeding is a reminder that raisins came with their pits, though mechanical seeders and seedless varieties were displacing hand-seeding by around 1900. Period cake chapters are commonly organised exactly this way, with one fully written master recipe followed by a run of variations that say only "mix same as" and list what changes.