Bake in a pie-pan, pressing the cake until it is about one-quarter of an inch high. Before baking, sprinkle sugar and ground cinnamon on top; after it is baked, cut it into squares while it is yet warm.
Ranaque Buns.
Ingredients: One pound of butter, one and a quarter pounds of sugar, two pounds of flour, six eggs, four table-spoonfuls of ground cinnamon.
Mix the cinnamon into the flour; rub the butter to a cream, then mix the flour with it. Beat the sugar with the eggs, then all together, as little as possible. Distribute this by the spoonful into rough-looking cakes on buttered tins placed at a little distance apart. This is a very nice lunch-cake.
Frosting.
The old way of making frosting was a half-day’s work. I now laugh at the extra exertion once made to be sure that the eggs were sufficiently and properly beaten. The following is the true way to make frosting, which is done and dried on the cake in ten minutes, allowing three minutes for the making:
Use a heaping tea-cupful of fine pulverized sugar to the white of each egg, or, say, a pound of sugar to the whites of three eggs. Beat the whites until they are slightly foaming only; do not beat them to a froth. The sugar may all be poured on the egg at once, or, if considered easier to mix, it may be gradually added. Either way, as soon as the sugar and eggs are thoroughly stirred together, and flavored with a little lemon or vanilla, the icing is ready to spread over the cake. It would be advisable to ice the cakes as soon as they are taken from the oven. The icing made with the white of one egg is quite sufficient to frost an ordinary-sized cake.
It is very little extra trouble to decorate a frosted cake. One can purchase funnels for the purpose with different shaped ends. In place of no better funnel, make a cornucopia of stiff writing-paper; fill it with the frosting, and press it out at the small end, forming different shapes, according to taste, over the cake. Little centre-pieces or leaves can always be purchased at the confectioner’s to aid in the decoration.
For a cocoa-nut-cake, mix plenty of the grated cocoa-nut into the frosting, which spread over the cake; decorate it then with plain frosting.
For a chocolate-cake, after spreading over the chocolate frosting mentioned in the receipt for chocolate-cake, decorate it with delicate lines of the white frosting.