Sunshine Cake
Whites 10 eggs 11½ cups powdered sugar Yolks 6 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon extract 1 cup flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar Beat whites of eggs until stiff and dry, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, and extract. Cut and fold in flour mixed and sifted with cream of tartar. Bake fifty minutes in a moderate oven in an angel-cake pan.
A foam cake of the angel-food family, leavened entirely by beaten egg and stabilised with cream of tartar. Two things in the printed text need attention before you start: the sugar quantity and the pan.
- The sugar figure is a misprint"11½ cups powdered sugar" cannot be right against one cup of flour and the whites of ten eggs with six yolks. Sunshine cake recipes of this type call for 1½ cups sugar, which is most likely what was intended.
- Powdered sugar meant something elseIn 1896 "powdered sugar" was a fine-grained granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Use superfine (caster) sugar; it dissolves into the whites without weighing them down.
- Moderate ovenThe text gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually read as 325 to 350F. Foam cakes are generally better at the lower end of that range, and fifty minutes at 325F gives the interior time to set before the crust colours.
- Angel-cake panAn ungreased tube pan; the recipe does not give a size, and a 10-inch tube pan is the usual modern equivalent. Do not grease it and do not substitute a nonstick tube pan if you can avoid it: the batter climbs the sides as it rises, and a slick surface gives you a short, dense cake.
- FlourCake flour, sifted before measuring and again with the cream of tartar. A soft flour gives a more tender crumb here than a strong modern all-purpose.
- Stiff and dryTake this as stiff peaks, not literally dry. Whites beaten past that point break into curds and will not fold smoothly with the yolks.
- FoldingThe text directs cutting and folding for the flour; the yolks and extract are simply added. Adding the flour in stages helps, and every stroke past the point of incorporation costs height.
- CoolingInvert the pan the moment it leaves the oven — over a bottle neck or on the pan's own feet — and leave it until fully cold. A foam cake cooled upright collapses under its own weight.
- YieldOne tube cake, roughly 12 to 16 slices. Cut with a serrated knife using a sawing motion; pressing down compacts the crumb.
Sunshine cake is the yolk-bearing cousin of angel food, and it sits at the end of a century in which American baking moved toward egg-foam cakes. Angel food spread through community and church cookbooks in the 1870s and 1880s, prized for whiteness and lightness, and it left cooks with bowls of surplus yolks; sunshine cake is the obvious answer, returning six of the ten yolks to the batter, and the name is generally taken to refer to the yellow crumb. Both cakes depended on cream of tartar, which stabilises the whites and keeps the crumb tender, and on the wire whisk or rotary egg beater, without which the beating of ten eggs' whites and six yolks is a serious undertaking. The tall central-tube pan, often called simply an angel-cake pan by the 1890s, exists so heat reaches the middle of a batter too delicate to survive a long bake.