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Caramel Layer Cake
1/3 cup Mazola 1 cup sugar Few grains salt 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 cup milk 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Flour-about 1½ cups Pour the Mazola in the mixing bowl, add the sugar, salt, egg yolks, vanilla and beat till creamy. Put the cornstarch in a , vanilla and beat till creamy. Put the cornstarch in a measuring cup, fill the cup with flour and then measure out another half cup.
Add two teaspoons baking powder and sift into the egg mixture , alternately with the milk. Beat well, fold in the egg whites whipped light and bake in two layer cake pans oiled with Mazola. Put together and frost with Caramel Icing.
A corn-oil layer cake from a Corn Products promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew what a layer cake looked like coming out of the oven. The gaps are the oven temperature, the baking time and the icing, all of which you supply yourself.
- Read the flour instruction twiceThe garbled line means: put the 2 tablespoons of cornstarch in a dry measuring cup, top it up with flour to make one full cup, then measure a further half cup of flour. Total dry mixture is about 1 1/2 cups, of which 2 tablespoons is cornstarch. The duplicated phrase in the middle of the text is a typesetting slip, not a second step.
- MazolaCorn oil, then and now, and interchangeable with any neutral vegetable oil. One-third cup is a modest amount of fat for this quantity of flour, which is why the cake is on the lean, tender-crumbed side rather than rich.
- The baking powder is easy to missTwo teaspoons appears mid-sentence, buried in the method rather than listed with the ingredients. Sift it with the flour and cornstarch before it goes anywhere near the milk.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and no pan size is specified either. A cake of this type is usually baked at about 350F; in two 8-inch pans, expect roughly 22 to 28 minutes, and test with a skewer at the centre.
- Separating the eggsYolks go in with the oil and sugar, whites are beaten stiff and folded in last. This is the cake's only real lift beyond the baking powder, so fold gently and get the batter into the pans promptly.
- Oiling the pansBrushing with oil alone will not reliably release a cake this lean. Oil and then flour the pans, or line the bases with parchment.
- Caramel IcingNot included here; the booklet expects you to turn to its own icing recipe. Any cooked brown-sugar caramel frosting will suit, and you will need enough to fill and cover two layers, so figure on about 2 1/2 cups.
- YieldTwo layers (8-inch pans are the usual assumption; the recipe does not say), serving eight to ten.
Booklets like this one were written by manufacturers rather than cooks, and the branded names in the ingredient list are the point of the exercise: Mazola corn oil, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, which distributed free recipe pamphlets to teach housewives new uses for them. Mazola is generally traced to that company's introduction of a refined corn oil for the table in the early 1910s, at a time when American baking still ran overwhelmingly on butter and lard, and a liquid fat in a layer cake needed argument. The cornstarch here is doing a genuine job rather than a promotional one -- replacing a couple of tablespoons of wheat flour with starch lowers the protein and softens the crumb, the same trick that produces cake flour.