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Burnt Sugar Cake
Take one cup of granulated sugar, place in a skillet and let it melt. Then pour in boiling water and stir utnil it is a thick syrup. Now 1 cup sugar, 1 of good rich milk, lump butter, size of an egg, 3 teaspoonfuls of baking powder, 2 tablespoonfuls burnt sugar, 2 eggs beaten well, flour enough to make stiff as a common cake. Sift the baking powder into the flour. Flavor with vanilla extract. To white icing add 2 spoons of burnt sugar and put between and on top of layers. This is a fourlayer cake.
A plain butter cake carrying its flavour from a caramel syrup you make first and use twice, in the batter and in the icing. The original assumes you already know how much flour a cake takes, so a few quantities need pinning down.
- The caramel is the hingeMelt the cup of sugar dry in a heavy skillet over medium heat until it is the colour of dark tea; pull it off the moment it smells nutty, because it turns acrid within seconds of that point. Adding boiling water to molten sugar erupts violently, so add it a spoonful at a time at arm's length, then stir over low heat until the hardened lumps redissolve into a pourable syrup.
- How much boiling waterThe recipe does not say. About half a cup will give a syrup roughly the thickness of maple syrup. The batter uses only 2 tablespoons and the icing '2 spoons' (size unspecified); the rest keeps for weeks in a jar in the refrigerator.
- Lump of butter size of an eggAround 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Soften it rather than melting it, since the method is a standard creamed cake even though the original never says so.
- Flour enough to make stiff as a common cakeWith 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk and 2 eggs, that lands at about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of plain flour. Aim for a batter that drops thickly from the spoon rather than one you could knead; "stiff" here means thicker than pancake batter, not a dough.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is at the upper end for 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour but not out of line with modern practice; if you prefer, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons is enough and reduces the bitter aftertaste an excess can leave.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F. Four thin layers in 8-inch pans need roughly 15 to 20 minutes each; test at 15.
- White icingIn a book of this period this means a boiled icing, sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites, or a simple confectioners' sugar and water glaze. Boiled icing takes the burnt sugar better and stays soft enough to slice through four layers. If you use a raw-white icing, note that the whites are never cooked.
- YieldOne four-layer 8-inch cake, 12 to 16 servings. The layers are meant to be thin, so resist dividing the batter into two thick pans.
Burnt sugar cake belongs to a family of American cakes built on a single homemade flavouring syrup, alongside caramel, molasses and maple. Before commercial extracts and caramel colouring were cheap and widely stocked, a cook who wanted that flavour scorched her own sugar in a skillet, and the resulting syrup, often kept in a bottle on the shelf, did double duty as flavour and colour in cakes, icings, gravies and puddings. It turns up constantly in community and "bride's" cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, books assembled to give a new housekeeper a working repertoire, which is why the instructions here take so much for granted: creaming, oven heat and the amount of flour are all left unspecified. The tall thin layers are of the period too.