Home › Cake › Marshmallow Cake
Marshmallow Cake
3 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar Whites 5 eggs 1½ teaspoon vanilla Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. Bake in shallow pans, and put Marshmallow Cream between the layers and on the top.
This page has come through the scanner badly, and two of its numbers cannot be taken at face value. Read the list against the book's standard butter-cake proportions before you start creaming anything.
- The flour is missingNo flour appears in the transcribed list, and a butter cake of this size cannot be made without it. Treat the quantity as unrecoverable from this page rather than authoritative; the three teaspoons of baking powder are the only clue to scale.
- Fractions checkedThe cream of tartar and butter quantities were checked against the printed page: a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar and a scant half cup of butter, as the text now gives. The butter is in proportion with the cup of sugar for a layer cake.
- Cream of tartar with baking powderThe small addition is not leavening insurance; it acidifies the batter slightly, which was commonly held to keep a white cake from taking on a yellow-grey cast.
- "Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes"In the standard method that means cream the butter, add the sugar gradually, then add the milk and the sifted flour and baking powder alternately and in small amounts, folding in the stiffly beaten whites last. Adding all the milk at once can separate the creamed butter.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Shallow layers of this type are usually baked in a moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes. Two 8- or 9-inch round pans would give the two layers the assembly instruction assumes.
- Marshmallow CreamThis is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, not a jarred product. Spread it while it is still workable; a marshmallow frosting sets firm and will tear the crumb if you fight it once it has stiffened.
- YieldTwo shallow layers; if baked in 9-inch pans, twelve to sixteen slices. Five egg whites leaves five yolks over.
Marshmallow as a confection began as a medicinal paste: the mucilaginous root of the marsh mallow, Althaea officinalis, beaten with sugar and egg white into a soothing lozenge. By the time this book was compiled, the root had dropped out entirely and gelatin had largely replaced it, a shift often credited with making marshmallow cheap, reliable, and widespread in American home baking. Cakes iced with a boiled marshmallow cream "whether set with gelatin or built on egg whites and boiled syrup" turn up constantly in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, alongside cornstarch cakes and other frostings that depend on manufactured ingredients a housekeeper could now buy in a packet. The cake underneath is nothing unusual, a plain white butter cake built on egg whites alone; the marshmallow is the whole point, and the name tells you which part the cook was showing off.