Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Orange Cake
Orange Cake
Mrs. S. McMaster.
Two cups of flour, two cups of sugar, one-half cup of water, two teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, yolks of five eggs, whites of three ; bake like jelly cake. Dressing: Whites of two eggs, grate the rind of two oranges, add the juice, sugar to thicken; put this between the cakes and set back in the oven for a minute.
A late-19th-century Canadian sponge layer cake with an orange filling. The cake itself is straightforward; the filling is the problem, and it is why this page carries a caution.
- Why the filling failsThe dressing is raw egg white beaten with orange juice, rind and sugar, spread between cool cake layers and returned to the oven "for a minute." A minute of residual oven heat through a layer of cake will not raise the interior of that filling anywhere near 160F, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives. Use a current cooked or pasteurised-egg frosting recipe instead.
- "Sugar to thicken" gives no quantityBeyond the food-safety issue, the filling has no measurable ratio at all. The amount of sugar needed depends entirely on how much juice two oranges give.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian proprietary brand named in period Canadian cookbooks. Period powders of this kind were generally single-acting, so batters were mixed and put in the oven at once. Modern double-acting powder can be substituted measure for measure.
- "Bake like jelly cake"Jelly cake means thin layers baked in shallow round tins so they can be stacked with filling; this quantity would give several. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time; in a modern moderate oven such thin layers bake quickly, and are done when the surface springs back.
- Five yolks, three whitesThe two spare whites are exactly what the dressing calls for, so nothing is left over. Note there is no butter or milk in the batter at all, only water, so this is a lean sponge that stales fast.
- Grating the rindGrate the zest into the sugar before adding liquid, and take only the coloured outer layer; any white pith carried into the mixture turns it bitter.
- YieldTwo cups of flour and two cups of sugar make a cake serving eight to ten.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by ladies of Toronto and other cities and is generally regarded as Canada's first fundraising community cookbook, sold for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, were the whole point of the format: the book's authority came from the collective reputation of identifiable local housekeepers rather than from a professional cook. Orange cake belongs to a family of Victorian layer cakes, the same tradition as jelly cake and lemon cake, that depended on the spread of reliable chemical baking powder, which made a quick light layer possible without long beating or yeast, and on improving transport, which by the later nineteenth century brought imported citrus within reach of Canadian households outside the growing season. Using the zest and juice raw in the filling, rather than cooking them into a curd, kept that fresh imported flavour front and centre.