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Rose Leaf Cakes
1 cupful rose leaves. 1/2 cupful Crisco. 3 eggs 1 cupful milk 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 lemon ½ teaspoonful salt king powder Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then add eggs well beaten, flour, baking powder, salt, milk, grated rind and 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, and fresh rose leaves. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderate oven from twelve to fifteen minutes. Sufficient for thirty-five cakes. 3 cupfuls flour - 1 cupful sugar
A plain lemon cupcake batter scented with rose petals, baked in gem pans. The method is straightforward creaming; the only unusual element is the petals folded through at the end.
- Gem pansGem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin — small, deep, individual cups, usually cast iron. A standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners works, though the cakes will be slightly larger and want a minute or two more.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is conventionally reckoned at about 350-375F. At twelve to fifteen minutes the cakes should spring back and a skewer come out clean; small cakes this size overbake quickly.
- Crisco quantityThe fat measurement has not survived in this listing. A cake with 4 cupfuls of flour and 1 cupful of milk in this style would normally take around 3/4 to 1 cupful of shortening — but that is inference, not what the book says.
- "Criscoed and floured"Grease and flour, in the house style of a book written to sell shortening. Any solid fat or a spray plus flour does the same job.
- Rose leavesHere "rose leaves" means the petals, not the foliage. Use unsprayed, strongly scented garden roses; florist roses are usually treated and nearly odourless. Shred the petals fine and fold them in last so they stay distinct rather than bruising into the batter.
- LemonOne lemon supplies both the grated rind and the tablespoonful of juice called for. Zest before juicing.
- SaltThe printed page gives half a teaspoonful of salt, which is what our text now reads. The stray words following it are run-on type from the baking-powder entry.
- YieldThirty-five small gem cakes, as stated, which is a large batch by modern standards; roughly two to two and a half dozen standard muffin-tin cupcakes. The batter does not hold well, so bake in successive pans rather than letting it stand.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a solid, shelf-stable vegetable shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil. Its recipes are conventional turn-of-the-century home baking with butter and lard written out of them, and the verb "to Crisco" a pan appears throughout as house style. Rose-scented cakes were themselves an older tradition — rose water and rose petals flavoured English and colonial American baking, though how far vanilla extract had displaced rose in the American pantry by 1913 is harder to pin down — so a rose leaf cake in 1913 may well have read as a genteel, slightly old-fashioned choice.