Sour Cream Cake

Today we are baking sour cream!

Sour Cream Cake 2¼ cups flour ¼ tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 1 cup sour cream 2 tsp vinegar 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sugar 4 egg whites Heat oven to 350°. Cut circles of parchment paper to fit the bottoms of two 8" round pans. Grease the pans, press the paper circles into place, then grease the top of the paper. Mix and sift the flour, soda, baking powder, and salt (or mix them with a whisk or fork to combine and fluff up). Set aside. Mix the sour cream and vinegar. Beat for one minute, add the vanilla and sugar and beat for two minutes. Add the dry ingredients and beat for one minute. Beat the egg whites very stiff and fold them in. If the batter is too thick and heavy to fold in the egg whites without deflating them, stir in more sour cream first. Pour into pans and bake for about twenty minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Sour cream pops up in a lot of cake recipes. It always adds a nice flavor to the raw batter, but I've always found that the taste disappears as it bakes. I've started to think that sour cream was just an older way to add something acidic to the batter so that your baking soda has something to react and fizz with. (And as a bonus, it economically repurposed near-expired dairy in the pre-pasteurization* days.) But Mrs. Mary Martensen has us adding vinegar to this as well, so I think the sour cream is here just for the taste (which hopefully won't disappear in the oven). 

On a more economical note, this cake contains no butter and implicitly directs you to save the egg yolks for another day. You can tell that Old Man Depression had invaded every home.

After beating our starting mixture, we had something that tasted almost but not quite like vanilla yogurt. You could have stirred in poppyseeds and drizzled it over a fruit salad.

Our dry ingredients turned our mixture into a hard paste. I could tell without trying that I would never fold the egg whites into this. No matter how gentle I was with a rubber spatula, they would completely deflate. I added more sour cream until the batter was thin enough to accept the eggy bubbles.

I was surprised that we needed to alter this recipe. I've made a lot of recipes out of this book, and all of them have worked as written. Granted, we've had a few cookie problems, but I don't blame Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Recipes for that. Flour has been problematic lately regardless of what cookbook we're using. 

I didn't do the best job of folding in the egg whites, but the batter did fluff up at least a little. But even if that fails, also have baking powder in the batter. So whether this recipe works or not, at least it will rise.

The cake puffed up quite nicely in the oven, which I found reassuring. No one likes a rubbery, spongy cake.

For the first time in all my baking, you could actually taste the sour cream in this cake. It almost had the same tang as cream cheese frosting. The cake itself was surprisingly firm in a way that suggests serving it with coffee or something like that. This was a lot better than I had expected when I slid the pan into the oven.

I thought the cake would be weird for having no butter or shortening in it, but I didn't notice the absence. So once again, we're going to have to salute Mrs. Mary Martensen and her recipes! 

 

 

 

 

*As often mentioned on this blog, unpasteurized milk goes sour instead of merely expiring in the refrigerator. So a lot of recipes back in the day called for sour milk for the same reason people today put squishy fruit into pies or drooping vegetables into soup. However, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend that anyone curious to try naturally soured raw milk drop the notion. Milk-borne diseases are terrible and not worth the risk. ↪