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Marshmallow Cake
Half cup of butter, one and one-half cups of sugar, one-half cup of milk, whites of five eggs, one-half teaspoonful vanilla, two cups of flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Beat butter to a cream and gradually beat into it the sugar and vanilla, add milk and the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs, then the flour and baking powder sifted together. Bake in three layers. Filling-Boil one and one-half cups sugar with three-quarters cups of water till it threads. Just before taking off the fire put in half a pound of marshmallows (cut in bits to melt easily). Pour this mixture in the beaten whites of two eggs and beat until cold enough to spread. By using the pink marshmallows it makes a very pretty cake.
A white butter cake with a boiled marshmallow meringue filling. The original gives no oven temperature and no pan size, both of which need supplying.
- Oven and pansBake at 350F in three greased and floured 8-inch round pans, 18 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. The batter is thin for three layers, so divide it by weight if you can.
- "Till it threads"This is the thread stage, 230-235F on a candy thermometer: syrup falls from the spoon in a fine thread rather than drops. Below that the filling will not set; cooked well past it the filling stiffens as it cools and is hard to spread.
- The hingeAdd the marshmallows off the heat or at the very last moment, and pour the syrup into the whites in a slow steady stream at the side of the bowl while beating. Dumping it in cooks the whites into threads instead of building the meringue.
- Marshmallow quantityHalf a pound is 8 oz, roughly 4 to 5 cups of miniature marshmallows, which need no cutting; the recipe's instruction to cut them in bits is for the larger kind, so they melt quickly in the hot syrup.
- Egg whitesFive whites is about 5 fl oz (150 g) for the cake, two more (about 60 g) for the filling. Beat them to stiff but not dry peaks and fold them into the batter rather than beating them in, or the cake will be dense.
- Order of mixingAs written, milk and whites go in before the flour. Better results come from alternating the flour mixture with the milk, then folding the whites in last.
- Pink marshmallowsPink marshmallows tint the filling; a drop of food coloring in the finished frosting does the same thing more reliably.
- Yield and keepingOne three-layer cake, 10 to 12 servings. Boiled meringue frosting weeps and grows crusty after a day; serve it the day it is made.
Marshmallow confections take their name from Althaea officinalis, the marsh mallow, whose mucilaginous root was once boiled with sugar to make a soft lozenge sold as much for sore throats as for pleasure. By the later nineteenth century commercial makers had largely replaced the root with gelatin and egg white, and boxed marshmallows became a fixture of American home cooking — folded into fillings, melted over cake, piled on sweet potatoes. A cake like this one belongs to that moment: a plain white layer cake dressed up with a boiled frosting that leaned on a store-bought novelty.