Golden Cake
¼ cup butter or shortening
2 teaspoons baking-powder
½ cup sugar
I/4 cup milk
3 egg-yolks
1 teaspoon orange extract
1 cup flour
Cream the butter or shortening and add the sugar gradually. Beat the yolks until thick and lemon-colored. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add to the first mixture alternately with the milk. Flavor. Bake as loaf or layer cake, in a moderate oven (380° F.) for forty-five minutes.
A small one-cup-of-flour butter cake built to use up yolks. The method is compressed almost to shorthand, and one step is missing from the sequence as printed.
- The yolksThe recipe tells you to beat the yolks but never says when to add them. Beat them thick and pale, then stir them into the creamed butter and sugar before the flour and milk go in alternately. Skipping them into the batter at the end will give you a streaky crumb.
- OvenThe recipe prints 380F outright, and glosses it as 'moderate.' In a modern oven, which tends to run hotter and drier than a period range, 350-360F is safer for a loaf.
- TimingThe recipe gives forty-five minutes for loaf or layers alike, but split between two 6- or 8-inch layer pans this batter will be done well before that, in roughly 18-22 minutes; forty-five would dry it out. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- Pan sizeOne cup of flour makes a small cake. Use a small loaf tin (around 6 x 4 inches) or two 6-inch rounds; an 8-inch square will bake up thin and flat.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to one cup of flour is generous by current standards. With modern double-acting powder, 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup gives a better crumb.
- ShorteningIn books of this period 'shortening' covers lard, compound fats and the newer solid vegetable shortenings alike. Butter gives a better flavour in a cake this plain and creams readily at cool room temperature.
- Orange extractA teaspoon of modern extract is fine, but the finely grated zest of one orange, folded in with the yolks, gives a fresher orange flavour.
- YieldAbout eight small slices as a loaf, or one modest two-layer cake.
Golden cake is the counterpart of silver or white cake, and the two exist because of each other: a household that made an angel food or a white layer cake with a dozen whites was left with a bowl of yolks, and golden cake was a standard answer. American cookbooks of the period often print the pair together for that reason, and the two batters were sometimes combined in a single marbled loaf. Butterick was a pattern company whose publishing business was practical instruction for the home.