Home › Supper › Velvety White Cake
Velvety White Cake
1/3 cup Mazola 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon orange juice 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Grated rind 1/2 lemon 1/4 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup milk 1/2 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1½ cups bread flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 3 egg whites Pour the Mazola into a bowl, add the sugar, fruit juices and lemon rind and stir till creamy. Sift together the cornstarch, flour and baking powder, and add alternately with the milk. Gradually fold in the egg whites beaten stiff and bake in a good-sized pan about forty minutes, in a moderately hot oven, 350 to 375 degrees F. The loaf should not be more than two half inches thick. Cover with Marshmallow Icing or with Plain Confectioner's Icing thickly dusted with chopped, candied orange peel and nut meats. and a
An oil-based white cake from a corn-products promotional booklet, built for tenderness rather than height. The whipped whites are the only real leavening partner to the baking powder, so how you fold them decides whether the cake is velvety or dense.
- Fold, don't stirThere is no creamed butter here to hold air, so the beaten whites are the cake's structure. Fold them in three additions with a spatula until just combined; overmixing collapses them and you get a flat, greasy crumb.
- Mazola is corn oilAny neutral vegetable oil works in the same measure. Oil cannot be creamed, which is why the recipe only asks you to stir the sugar and juices into it until "creamy" — the mixture will look grainy and wet, and that is correct.
- Argo or Kingsford's cornstarchPlain cornstarch, unchanged. Cutting wheat flour with cornstarch is a long-standing way to imitate a softer cake flour; the starch dilutes the gluten. If you use cake flour instead, replace the whole 2 cups of cornstarch-and-flour with 2 cups cake flour.
- Bread flour is deliberateIt seems wrong in a delicate cake, but the half cup of cornstarch pulls the total protein down to somewhere between cake and all-purpose flour. Do not simply swap in all-purpose without reducing the cornstarch, or the cake will be crumbly.
- OvenThe recipe gives its own numbers, 350 to 375F, which is unusually helpful for the period. Bake at 350F in a light-coloured pan; forty minutes is right for a thin sheet.
- The pan and the thickness"A good-sized pan" is not specified in the original; the sense is a pan wide enough to keep the batter shallow. "Two half inches" is garbled in the original — it may mean two and a half inches or one and a half. Either way the intent is a thin loaf.
- Salt and juiceThe recipe never says where the salt goes; it sits in the ingredient list between the rind and the milk, so either stirring it in with the oil and sugar or sifting it with the dry ingredients will do. The tablespoon of orange juice and half tablespoon of lemon give a faint brightness, not a citrus cake; the grated rind does most of the flavour work.
- Yield and finishingAbout 12 to 16 squares from a sheet pan. Marshmallow icing of the era is a boiled sugar syrup beaten into egg whites; a plain confectioner's icing of sugar, milk and a little butter is quicker and holds the candied peel and nuts just as well.
This comes from one of the branded cookbooks issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, whose Mazola oil and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch appear here by name in a recipe that exists chiefly to demonstrate them. Such booklets were given away in large numbers in the first decades of the twentieth century. The "velvety" in the title is doing sales work as much as description.