Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Orange Cake (Mrs Smith One cup of sugar)
Orange Cake (Mrs Smith One cup of sugar)
Mrs. Smith, One cup of sugar, half a cup of butter, half a cup of sweet milk, two cups of flour, three eggs, one and a-half teaspoonfuls of Cook's Friend baking powder; bake in jelly tins.
ORANGE FROSTING FOR SAME-One orange, grate off the outside, and mix with juice, and add sugar until quite stiff, and make like jelly cake; make four layers of the cake.
A plain three-egg butter cake baked in thin layers and filled with an uncooked orange icing. The original assumes you already know the creaming method and how hot your stove is, so the gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA commercial Canadian brand of the period. Substitute the same quantity of modern double-acting baking powder: one and a half teaspoons for two cups of flour is on the light side but workable.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk used with saleratus. Whole milk is the right choice.
- Jelly tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across, greased and floured. Four layers from this batter means each is very thin, so divide the batter by weight if you want them even, and expect 8 to 12 minutes of baking apiece.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Thin layers of a creamed butter cake want a moderately quick oven, about 375F, so they set before they dry out.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. The recipe lists ingredients rather than steps because it was written for readers assumed to be familiar with the method.
- The frosting is a raw glazeZest and juice of one orange stiffened with sugar means confectioners' sugar, roughly two to three cups, added until it holds its shape. Granulated sugar will stay gritty. One orange yields only a few tablespoons of juice, so add it gradually or the icing will slump off the thin layers.
- "Make like jelly cake"Spread the icing between the layers as a filling rather than only over the top, in the manner of a jelly cake. Jelly cakes were commonly left bare at the sides, which keeps the orange from being overwhelmed.
- YieldOne four-layer cake of about 8 inches, serving 8 to 10. It is best the day it is made; the uncooked icing weeps as it sits.
This comes from The Home Cook Book, compiled in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and generally described as the first Canadian community fundraising cookbook, sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children. Its recipes are credited by contributor name, which is why the page opens with "Mrs. Smith" and why the instructions are so telegraphic: these were notes traded between women who already knew the method and needed only the proportions. The cake itself is the standard one-cup-sugar, two-cup-flour layer cake of the period, distinguished entirely by its filling, and the orange is the point. Oranges were an imported item in Canadian kitchens of the day, so using a whole one, rind and all, in a filling was a modest indulgence. The reference to Cook's Friend baking powder places the book in the era when branded chemical leaveners were displacing saleratus and sour milk.