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Birthday Cake
Place in a basin twelve egg yolks with two ounces sugar, a teaspoon vanilla essence, and sharply whisk for fifteen minutes. Work a pound of fresh butter in a bowl with a wooden spoon for five minutes, add to yolks, mix well, beat up whites of the twelve eggs to a stiff froth and add to yolks. Mix with a skimmer until well amalgamated, add one and a half pounds sifted flour with two saltspoons salt, and gently but thoroughly mix with the skimmer. Have a lightly buttered, plain, flat mould eight inches wide and three inches high, line interior with a buttered paper, drop in preparation, neatly smooth surface, set in oven for one and a half hours, remove, let rest for one and a half hours, then turn on a wire pastry grating and remove paper. Mix in a bowl four ounces glazed sugar, the white of an egg, and evenly spread sugar over cake. Decorate surface with assorted candied fruits cut in very small pieces, place cake on silver dish with a folded napkin, arrange small candles all around and light them just before sending to table.
A butter-and-egg-foam cake with no chemical leavening, almost unsweetened in the crumb, finished with royal icing and candied fruit. The instructions assume a coal range and a practised hand, so a few numbers need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A cake of this depth and richness wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, with the rack in the lower third. At 350F an 8-inch pan this deep will likely need a foil tent over the top for the last half hour.
- The pan will overflowThe pan may overflow -- A pound of butter, twelve eggs and a pound and a half of flour makes on the order of nine to eleven cups of batter; an 8 by 3 inch mould holds roughly ten cups filled to the brim, so about eight in practice. Safer to divide between two pans, or use a 10-inch pan at least 3 inches deep, and adjust the time downward accordingly.
- The hinge: no leavening at allEvery bit of lift comes from air beaten into the yolks and whites. Fold the whites and then the flour with the lightest hand possible; if you knock the foam down the cake bakes dense and heavy.
- Whisking timesFifteen minutes of hand-whisking the yolks is four to five minutes in a stand mixer with the whisk, to a pale, thick ribbon. Creaming the butter five minutes with a wooden spoon means working it to a smooth, spreadable paste, not aerating it.
- SkimmerA flat perforated skimming spoon, used here as a folding tool. A large silicone spatula does the same job better.
- SaltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of salt.
- Glazed sugarIcing or confectioners' sugar. Four ounces beaten with one egg white makes a thin royal icing; add sugar until it spreads without running. Since it is never cooked, use pasteurized egg white or meringue powder.
- Resting and turning outThe hour and a half rest before unmoulding is not padding. This crumb is fragile while warm and will tear if turned out early. Cool fully in the pan, then invert onto a rack and peel the paper.
- YieldBaked as one large cake, twenty to twenty-four servings. The crumb is only faintly sweet by design; the sugar arrives in the icing and the candied fruit.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) collected dishes from the kitchens he knew as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its birthday cake is a plain, rich, European butter cake dressed up at the last moment. The candles matter more than the crumb: the custom of ringing a cake with small candles and lighting them at the table is generally traced to German Kinderfeste of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by Filippini's day it appears to have been familiar in American households. Note that the recipe ends not with a taste but with a tableau — silver dish, folded napkin, candles lit "just before sending to table" — which is a good reminder that the moment of service was part of the recipe. The near-absence of sugar in the batter is also of its period; the sweetness was expected to come from the icing and the candied fruit spread across the top.