Orange Cake
1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup milk 1⅔ cups flour 2½ teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, eggs well beaten, and milk. Then add flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Bake in a thin sheet in a dripping-pan. Cut in halves, spread one-half with Orange Filling. Put over other half, and cover with Orange Frosting.
A plain butter cake baked flat, split, and sandwiched with orange filling — the Boston Cooking School's standard one-egg-per-half-cup-sugar formula in sheet form. The quantities as printed need reading with care.
- Flour and baking powderThe flour and baking powder figures are garbled in printing. They read most naturally as about 1½ cups flour to 2½ teaspoons baking powder; a second figure of 1¾ cups flour also appears at the end of the entry. Start at 1½ cups and add more only if the batter is too slack to spread.
- Dripping-panA dripping-pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. A modern quarter-sheet pan (roughly 9 by 13 inches), buttered and lined, gives the thin sheet the recipe wants.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A thin butter sheet cake wants a moderate oven, 350F, for 18 to 25 minutes — until the top springs back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Creaming orderCream the butter and sugar thoroughly before the eggs go in; a quarter cup of butter is a small amount to aerate, so give it several minutes. The printed order adds all the milk before the flour; adding milk and flour alternately instead may help keep the batter from separating.
- Cut in halvesThis means cutting the baked sheet crosswise into two rectangles and stacking them, not splitting the cake horizontally. Cool completely first or the filling will slide.
- Filling and frostingBoth are separate recipes given elsewhere in the book. Orange Filling is a thickened orange custard and Orange Frosting a sugar-and-orange-juice icing; follow the book's own versions rather than this summary. Neither will hold at room temperature for long in warm weather.
- YieldAbout eight to ten servings as a two-layer rectangle.
Sheet cakes cut and stacked are often said to have been a practical solution in kitchens with one shallow pan and an unreliable range: a thin batter bakes fast and evenly, where a deep layer in a wood-fired oven risks a scorched crust over a raw middle. Orange as a cake flavour spread in American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century, a spread commonly linked to the growing rail shipments of Florida and California fruit, and orange fillings, frostings and cakes appear alongside the older lemon ones. The recipe is typical of the school's teaching method — one base butter cake, varied entirely by what goes between and on top.