One Egg Cake
1/2 cup milk 1½ cups flour 2½ teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten. Mix and sift flour and baking powder, add alternately with milk to first mixture. Bake thirty minutes in a shallow pan. Spread with Chocolate Frosting.
Chocolate Cake I ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 small eggs 1/2 cup milk 1½ cups flour 21½ teaspoons baking powder 2 ozs. chocolate, melted ½ teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and yolks of eggs well beaten, then whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Add beaten, then whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Add milk, flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and beat thoroughly.
Then add chocolate and vanilla. Bake forty minutes in a shallow cake pan. 1/2 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 2¼ cups flour
A plain creamed butter cake of the type that fills the middle chapters of Farmer's book — mixed by hand, baked flat, and finished with frosting rather than layered. A few of the conventions need translating.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; a modern equivalent for a shallow butter cake of this type is about 350F. Thirty minutes suits a single 8-inch square or round layer; the chocolate version is directed to bake forty.
- "Shallow pan"No size is given. An 8-inch square or 8-inch round tin, buttered and floured, is a plausible reading, giving a cake an inch or so deep that can be frosted on top and cut in squares.
- Baking powderThe quantity printed here is unclear; 2½ teaspoons to 1½ cups of flour is the reading that best fits the rest of the formula. That is generous by current standards, and 1½ to 2 teaspoons of fresh double-acting powder will do the same work.
- ChocolateTwo ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, melted over hot water and cooled slightly before it goes in. Semi-sweet or chips will make the batter both sweeter and stiffer.
- Beaten whitesIn the chocolate cake the whites are whipped separately and added before the milk and flour. Note that the recipe then says to "beat thoroughly"; if you prefer to keep the air in the whites, fold instead and get the batter into the oven promptly.
- ButterUnsalted butter, softened to room temperature. The recipe calls for no salt; if you use unsalted butter, a scant quarter teaspoon sifted with the flour restores the balance.
- YieldIn an 8-inch tin, nine to twelve squares.
The one-egg cake is a thrift recipe that earned a permanent place in American cookbooks. Eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and a cake that produced a respectable frosted square from a single egg was worth printing beside the richer gold and silver cakes. Fannie Farmer's contribution at the Boston Cooking School was less the recipes themselves than the insistence on level, standardized measurements, which is why these cake formulas read as ratios: half a cup of butter, a cup of sugar, a cup and a half of flour. The chocolate cake that follows shows how the same skeleton was varied: add melted unsweetened chocolate, split the eggs and beat the whites for lift, and extend the baking time to account for the extra moisture.