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Sandwich Cake
Miss Brokovski.
One coffee cup of sugar, one large tablespoonful of butter beaten to a cream with the sugar, three eggs beaten separately, one heaping coffee-cup of flour, three teaspoonsful of Cook's Friend baking powder mixed well through the flour, and one tablespoonful of milk; if cream of tartar, two teaspoonsful and one of soda, mixing the cream of tartar in the flour, and putting soda in the milk. Mix all together, seasoning with extract of lemon; beat well for a few minutes; bake on four flat tins in a quick This may be put together with jelly or custard or cocoanut, using the dessicated cocoanut, moistened with the whites of three eggs beaten to a froth, and iced over. oven.
A four-layer sponge of the sort every nineteenth-century cookbook carried, with the printer dropping the word "oven" to the end of the paragraph. The measurements are cup-and-spoon and one of them is badly out of line with modern leavening.
- Coffee cupA coffee cup in this period is roughly a standard 8 oz cup, sometimes a little less. Read it as 1 cup sugar and 1 heaping cup (about 5 oz) flour, and keep the two in the same proportion whichever cup you use.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian-made brand of the period (associated with McLaren's). Any modern double-acting baking powder stands in for it.
- Cut the leaveningThree teaspoons of baking powder to one cup of flour is roughly triple what a modern powder needs; period powders were single-acting and varied in strength. Use 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons. The alternative the recipe gives -- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar in the flour with 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in the milk -- is in the usual 2:1 proportion but is, if anything, more leavening still rather than less, so scale it down in the same way.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis is the structure of the cake, not a flourish. Beat the yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, fold the stiff whites in last, and fold rather than stir once the flour is in.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Thin layers in flat tins bake in about 8 to 12 minutes at that heat; watch them from the eighth minute, since a cake this shallow goes from set to dry quickly.
- Four flat tinsFour shallow round layer tins (the original gives no size), each holding only a thin film of batter. Grease and flour, or line with parchment; the layers are fragile coming out.
- Desiccated cocoanut fillingThe coconut is bound with raw beaten egg white and never cooked. Use pasteurized whites if you make it, or use a cooked frosting; jelly or a boiled custard, both offered in the original, avoid the question entirely.
- YieldOne four-layer cake; the number of servings depends on the tin size. It is a light butter cake, not a keeper, and is best the day it is put together.
"Sandwich cake" is a name used in British and colonial cookery for a plain butter sponge baked in thin layers and sandwiched with jam, jelly, custard or coconut. Its appearance here, credited to a Miss Brokovski, is typical of The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877), which was assembled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children. The three teaspoons of "Cook's Friend" point to the spread of chemical leavening in the household kitchen: commercial baking powders arrived in the 1850s and 1860s, they varied a good deal in strength, and cookbooks of the period will often offer the cream of tartar and soda version alongside the branded tin for cooks who did not trust it or could not buy it.