Home › Cake-Making › Ten-Minute Cake
Ten-Minute Cake
One-fourth pound butter, a little less than a pound flour, the same of sugar, six eggs beaten separately; flavor with mace and bake in muffin-rings. - Mrs. S. C. Lee, Baltimore, Md.
A terse pound-cake variant baked in rings rather than a loaf, so it cooks in about ten minutes. The proportions are given by weight, and one of them is almost certainly incomplete.
- The proportions as writtenA quarter pound butter (1 stick), close to a pound of flour (about 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 cups), the same again of sugar (a little under 2 1/4 cups), six eggs. That is a very dry, very sweet ratio with no liquid at all, and the batter will be closer to a stiff paste than anything pourable.
- Something is missingThe original gives no liquid and no leavening, and with only a quarter pound of butter to nearly a pound each of flour and sugar the proportions look incomplete, though cakes of this family often do without both. Treat it as a record rather than a working formula, or add liquid by feel until the batter drops heavily from the spoon.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis is the entire rising mechanism. Whites are whipped to soft peaks and folded in last; yolks go in with the creamed butter and sugar. Overfolding collapses the only lift the cake has.
- Muffin ringsMetal rings set on a greased baking sheet or griddle, roughly 3 inches across and an inch deep. Straight-sided crumpet rings or egg rings do the same job; a shallow muffin tin is the nearest common substitute, though the cakes will be taller and slower.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Ten minutes for cakes this small suggests a fairly hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F, but that is a modern guess rather than anything the book states. Check at eight minutes, since another two will dry them out.
- MaceThe ground aril of the nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than the seed itself. Start with half a teaspoon for the full quantity; older mace loses its perfume quickly, so buy small amounts.
- YieldThe full recipe makes a great deal of batter, roughly two to three dozen small cakes. Halving or quartering it is sensible for a first attempt.
Cakes built on weighed butter, sugar, flour and eggs descend from the English pound cake, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of variants that shift the ratios, cut the butter, or bake the batter small to save time. "Ten-Minute Cake" earns its name only from the baking, not the mixing: beating six eggs separately by hand is the slow part, and the muffin rings simply let a stiff pound-cake batter cook through before it dries. The Dixie Cook Book was assembled largely out of contributed receipts credited by name and town, which is why this one arrives from a Mrs. S. C. Lee of Baltimore with the brevity of a note passed between cooks who already knew what the batter should look like. Mace, common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century baking and now largely displaced by nutmeg and cinnamon, was a frequent flavouring for plain butter cakes of this kind.