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Golden Orange Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 1 teaspoonful orange extract 1 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful milk 5 eggs or yolks of 10 eggs 4 cupfuls flour 1 cupful Crisco 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder Orange icing For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add salt, eggs well beaten, orange extract, and flour and baking powder alternately with milk. Mix carefully and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven about one hour. This mixture may be baked in layers. For icing. Boil 1 cupful water with 2 cupfuls sugar till it forms soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240° F., then pour over well beaten yolks of four eggs, beat until smooth and thick, add 1½ teaspoonfuls orange extract and spread at once on cake.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A large yolk-rich butter cake from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook, finished with a boiled-syrup yolk icing. Two things need attention before you start: the batter is bigger than most modern pans expect, and the trailing ingredient list is a printer's error.
- The stray list at the endThe final four lines (3/4 cupful sugar, 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco, 1/2 cupful milk, 4 yolks of eggs) belong to a different recipe and have nothing to do with this cake. Ignore them; the cake and icing are complete without them.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no figure; a moderate oven is conventionally read as around 350F. An hour suits a deep single cake; baked in layers it will be done well before that, so check early.
- CupfulsAn 8 fl oz cup throughout. One cupful of Crisco is about 7 oz or 200 g of shortening; 4 cupfuls of flour may run anywhere from about 16 to 20 oz depending on how the cup is filled, so weigh if you want consistency.
- Pan sizeThis is a big batter, close to four pounds. Use a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch rounds plus a small extra pan. A single 9-inch layer tin will overflow.
- Crisco then and nowThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and blander than today's reformulated, trans-fat-free version. Modern shortening creams a little softer, so beat it cold from the tub rather than at room temperature.
- Eggs or yolksTen yolks give the deep gold colour the name promises and a closer, richer crumb; five whole eggs give a lighter, paler cake. The recipe works either way, but they are not interchangeable in texture.
- Orange extractA teaspoonful of extract in this quantity of batter is faint by modern standards. The zest of two oranges rubbed into the sugar first will do more, and you can keep the extract as well.
- The icingThe recipe offers the cold-water soft-ball test and 240F as equivalents; a thermometer is simply the easier of the two. Pour the syrup into the beating yolks in a slow thread or you will scramble them, and spread while still warm because it sets firm as it cools. The yolks are only partly cooked by the hot syrup, so use pasteurized yolks if serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg.
- YieldOne large cake, 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well for three or four days, well wrapped, thanks to the shortening.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself was introduced as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil substitute for lard and butter. Every recipe in it is an argument, and this one makes the case that a plain shortening cake can be as rich as any butter cake if you load it with yolks. A "golden" or gold cake in this period generally meant a yolk cake, the counterpart to the white or silver cake that used the whites, and the two were commonly printed together. The boiled-syrup icing here takes four more yolks.