Home › Unusual Recipes › Birthday Cake
Birthday Cake
1/2 cup Mazola 1 cup sugar 1 egg 4 egg yolks 1 teaspoon orange extract 2½ teaspoons 1/3 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup milk 1½ cups flour 1/2 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch baking powder Pour the Mazola into a bowl, add the sugar and the egg and egg yolks, beaten creamy. Cream till all the graininess has disappeared, and add the extract and salt. Sift together the flour, cornstarch and baking powder and add alternately to the first mixture, with milk. Beat two or three minutes, transfer to a tube pan lightly oiled with Mazola, and bake forty-five minutes in a moderately hot oven, 350 to 375 degrees F. Cool, brush off the crumbs and decorate with Ornamental Icing. Fill the "hole" in the center with tiny favors or with fresh flowers. Put the cake on a small tray covered with a paper doily, and wreathe with flowers.
A corn-oil butter cake from a Corn Products advertising booklet, with the ingredient list badly mangled in the original setting. Most of it can be reconstructed with confidence, but read the notes before measuring.
- The scrambled ingredient listThe column has collapsed: "21/2 teaspoons" belongs with the baking powder, and the stray "1/2" sitting before "1/4 cup" is a fragment left over from the collapse. The most plausible reading is 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/3 teaspoon salt. That is slightly more baking powder than current practice for this much flour; 2 teaspoons would be closer.
- MazolaCorn oil, then and now, and the booklet exists to sell it. Any neutral vegetable oil works. Because it is oil rather than creamed butter, the batter will never aerate the way a butter cake does — the lift comes almost entirely from the eggs and the baking powder.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch. Adding it alongside the flour — here about one part starch to six of flour — lowers the overall protein and gives the fine, tender, slightly dry crumb associated with old-fashioned white and silver cakes.
- "Cream till all the graininess has disappeared"With oil rather than solid fat you are not creaming in air, you are dissolving the sugar into the eggs. Beat until the mixture is pale and no sugar crystals grate against the side of the bowl — three to four minutes with a mixer.
- The hinge: do not overbeat at the endThe instruction to beat two or three minutes after the flour goes in is from an era of weaker flour and hand mixing. With modern all-purpose flour and an electric mixer, that much beating develops gluten and toughens the cake. Mix only until smooth.
- Oven and pan350 to 375°F is stated outright, which is helpful. A 9-inch tube pan is a reasonable size for this batter, though the recipe does not specify; use 350°F and start checking at 35 minutes, since 45 minutes suits a slower oven than most home ovens run today.
- Egg yolksOne whole egg plus four yolks leaves four whites over. They will keep refrigerated for several days, or freeze, and ornamental icings of this period were generally built on beaten egg white, so the Ornamental Icing referred to at the end is a likely use for them.
- YieldA single tube cake; the pan size is not given, and with only 1 1/2 cups of flour it is a modest one. The decoration — favors or flowers in the center hole, doily, wreath of flowers — is the whole point of its inclusion as a birthday cake.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of Mazola oil, Argo cornstarch and Karo syrup, which spent the first decades of the twentieth century persuading American cooks that corn oil could replace butter and lard in baking. The branded names in the ingredient list are not incidental; they are the reason the book was printed and given away. What makes the cake interesting apart from the advertising is the cornstarch, a common early-twentieth-century trick for softening the crumb of a plain cake at a time when cake flour was not universally available on grocery shelves. The finishing directions — favors or fresh flowers set in the tube pan's hole, a paper doily, a wreath around the base — describe a table decoration as much as a dessert, and reflect a period when the birthday cake's presentation was expected to carry the occasion.