Spanish Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar Yolks 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1¾ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon Whites 2 eggs Mix ingredients in order given. Bake in shallow tins and spread between and on top Caramel Frosting.
A plain butter cake in the standard Fannie Farmer proportions, spiced with cinnamon and layered with caramel frosting. Everything hinges on how the whites are handled at the end.
- The flour quantityThe flour reads as 1 3/4 cups, consistent with the other quantities here -- 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk. That is roughly 7 to 7 1/2 oz by weight.
- "Mix ingredients in order given"This is Farmer's shorthand for a specific method: cream the butter, add the sugar gradually, beat in the yolks, then add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder and cinnamon. The egg whites are beaten stiff and folded in last -- they are listed after the leavening for that reason, not to be beaten in with everything else.
- Shallow tinsLayer-cake pans rather than a deep tin; the recipe gives no size, and round layer pans of about 8 inches suit this quantity of batter.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, about 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, works for layers this size; bake until a skewer comes out clean and the cake pulls slightly from the sides.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups of flour is a heavy hand by current standards; around 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder is closer to present practice.
- Caramel FrostingA cross-reference to another recipe in the book, a boiled sugar icing beaten until it thickens. Spread it while it is still soft enough to move easily.
- YieldEnough batter for two thin layers; servings will depend on how it is cut.
The name tells you almost nothing about Spain. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American cookbooks are often said to have attached "Spanish" to sweets that carried cinnamon, and cinnamon alone is what distinguishes this cake from a plain butter cake. That interchangeability is the point of the cake section in Fannie Farmer's book: one reliable base formula, varied by a spice, a flavoring or a frosting, and set out in the level-measurement style that made the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book the standard American kitchen reference after 1896. Caramel frosting, made by boiling brown sugar with cream or milk, seems to have been a common finish of the period, cheap and needing no chocolate.