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Vanity Cake
One and a half cups sugar, half cup butter, half cup sweet milk, one and a half cups flour, half cup corn starch, tea-spoon bakingpowder, whites of six eggs; bake in two cakes, putting frosting between and on top. - Olivia S. Hinman, Battle Creek,
A white layer cake of the 1880s, lightened with cornstarch and egg whites. The method is left entirely to the cook, as it usually was; the order below is what the ingredient list assumes.
- The hinge: whites folded, not beaten inCream the butter and sugar, add the milk and sifted dry ingredients, then fold in the six whites beaten to soft peaks last. Stirring them in knocks out the air that does much of the lifting here, alongside the single teaspoon of baking powder, and gives a denser crumb.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. 350F suits a cake this size; two 8- or 9-inch layers take about 22-28 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because so many cakes of the period called for sour milk with saleratus. Whole milk is right.
- CornstarchHalf a cup of cornstarch replacing part of the flour lowers the protein and gives the fine, short crumb these "vanity" and "silver" cakes were prized for. Sift it with the flour two or three times so it disperses.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon for two cups of dry ingredients is light by current standards. With a modern double-acting powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons gives a more reliable rise without any soapy taste.
- Six whitesThat is roughly 3/4 cup, or 180 ml, from modern large eggs. Measure rather than count if your eggs are small.
- Pans and yield"Two cakes" means two round layers. Two 8- or 9-inch pans, greased and floured; 8-inch pans suit this quantity of batter better.
- FrostingThe recipe names no frosting. A boiled white icing or a plain confectioners'-sugar-and-cream frosting suits it; anything heavily flavoured buries a cake built for delicacy.
Vanity cake belongs to the family of white layer cakes -- silver cake, snow cake, lady cake -- that spread through American community cookbooks after cheap chemical leavening and finely bolted white flour became household staples in the second half of the nineteenth century. A cake made with whites alone, pale flour and cornstarch was a conspicuous use of ingredients, six yolks included. The book gathered recipes by contribution and printed the contributor's name and town, which is why a Battle Creek cook appears in a book that markets itself as Southern. The terse instructions are typical -- the compiler assumed any reader already knew how to cream butter and beat whites, and spent the words on proportions instead.