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Marshmallow Cake
1/4 teaspoon cream of 1/8 teaspoon salt cup shortening 1½ cups sugar ½ cup milk 2 cups flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder 4 egg whites teaspoon cream of tartar teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream the shortening, add the sugar gradually. Mix and sift the dry ingredients, flour, baking powder, cream of tartar and salt; add them alternately with the milk to the creamed mixture. Lastly, add the stifflybeaten egg-whites and the flavoring. Bake in layer cake pan about 30 minutes in a moderate oven, temperature 350°F. Put layers together with marshmallow frosting and ice with French cream frosting.
The ingredient list has been mangled in printing — it appears twice, in fragments, and the flour is missing entirely. Read the method first, then reconstruct the quantities before you start.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity survives on this page. A white layer cake built on ½ cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup milk and 4 egg whites conventionally takes about 3 cups of cake flour, but that is an inference from the proportions, not what the book says.
- Fractions dropped in printingThe lines reading "teaspoon cream of tartar" and "teaspoon salt" have lost their fractions. Cream of tartar with baking powder is there to stabilise the whites, so a quarter to a half teaspoon is the sane range; salt in a cake this size is about half a teaspoon.
- Four eggs, whites onlyThe bottom fragment says "4 eggs" and the method says four beaten whites. This is a white cake — the yolks are not used. Save them for the French cream frosting or a custard.
- Shortening means the butter"Cream the shortening" refers to the ½ cup butter listed rather than to a separate fat; no other shortening appears in the ingredient fragments. Butter at cool room temperature, around 65°F, creams best.
- OvenThe book gives 350°F outright alongside "moderate oven". It calls for a layer cake pan without stating size or number, and gives about 30 minutes; start testing a little before that.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in after the flour and milk, which makes them easy to overwork. Fold in a third to slacken the batter, then the rest, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- The two frostingsMarshmallow frosting is generally a boiled sugar syrup beaten into egg white, sometimes with gelatine; French cream frosting is a cooked or uncooked confectioners' sugar icing enriched with cream and often yolk. The recipe assumes both are made separately, and directs the cake to be filled and iced with them.
- YieldThe recipe does not state a yield or a number of layers; a batter of this size would fill two layers and serve roughly a dozen once filled and iced.
Marshmallow cake belongs to the great age of the American white layer cake, when chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar made a tall, pale, heavily frosted cake the standard offering for company. The marshmallow element is not the confection but the frosting: a boiled-syrup meringue, sometimes set with gelatine, that mimicked the texture of the marshmallow lozenges then sold by confectioners — themselves long removed from the marsh-mallow root mucilage that gave the sweet its name.