Home › Cakes › Cocoanut Pound Cake
Cocoanut Pound Cake
Beat one-half pound of butter to a cream, add gradually a pound of flour, one pound of powdered sugar, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a pinch of salt, a teaspoonful of grated lemon-peel, quarter of a pound of prepared cocoanut, four well-beaten eggs, and a cupful of milk; mix thoroughly; butter the tins, and line them with butter paper.
Pour the mixture in to the depth of an inch and a half, and bake in a good oven.
When baked take out, spread icing over them and return the cake to the oven a moment to dry the icing.
A pound-weight cake stretched with baking powder and milk, baked shallow and iced while warm. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easier to reproduce than most cakes of the period.
- Weigh, don't scoopA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups sifted. A pound of modern confectioners' sugar is roughly the same volume, but period "powdered sugar" often meant finely ground granulated, which is denser; either way the ratio only works if both are weighed. Half a pound of butter is two standard sticks.
- Fix the mixing orderCreaming the butter and then adding flour before the sugar, as written, gives a stiff paste that will not take the eggs smoothly. Cream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then alternate the dry ingredients with the milk.
- Prepared cocoanutThis means the packaged dried grated coconut sold in American groceries by the later nineteenth century, not fresh coconut meat. Unsweetened desiccated or fine shredded coconut is the closest match; sweetened flake will push an already sweet batter further.
- Butter paperThe wrapper from a pound of butter, used as a greased pan liner. Buttered parchment does the same job.
- A good ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, is the reasonable modern approximation. The batter is heavy with sugar and coconut, and anything hotter will set the crust before the center rises.
- Depth and timingAn inch and a half of batter in the pan means roughly 30 to 40 minutes in a moderate oven; test with a skewer at the center. Use as many tins as the batter fills to that depth.
- Drying the icingThis works with a boiled or water icing spread on a still-warm cake. Two or three minutes in the cooling oven sets a thin crust on the surface; a buttercream will simply melt.
- Not really a pound cakeThe baking powder and cup of milk make this lighter and more open than a true four-equal-pounds cake. Do not omit the baking powder to be authentic, or the crumb will be dense and dry.
By the late nineteenth century the name "pound cake" had loosened from its original meaning of a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, and cookbooks applied it to any rich butter cake weighed out in pounds, chemically leavened and thinned with milk. The coconut here marks the recipe as late nineteenth century: shredded, dried coconut sold in packets made the flavor available to households that would never have cracked a whole nut, and it turns up constantly in American cake and pie recipes of the 1880s and after.