White Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

First published Mar 17, 2011

White Cake with Brown Sugar Icing

White Cake
1 cup sifted cake flour*
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar**
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup milk, scalded***
1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350F. (180C)
Sift flour once, measure and resift twice with the baking powder and salt.
Beat eggs with a rotary beater until very light.
Add sugar gradually and continue to beat until thick and lemon colored.
Fold dry ingredi ents into egg mixture, gently but thoroughly.
Combine butter with scalded milk and vanilla and add to batter, stirring until blended.
Pour into a greased 9 by 9 by 2-inch pan and bake about 25 minutes, or until done.
Remove from oven and cool.

Brown Sugar Icing
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
4 tbsp milk
2 tbsp butter

Place above in saucepan over heat until full rolling boil. Take from heat and beat until stiff.
*Cake Flour: An easy way to do this is to put 2 tablespoons of the cornstarch into the bottom of a 1 cup measure, then fill to the top with flour.
**Recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar, but mom switched it to 3/4 as 1 cup is too sweet. But if you like it really sweet, by all means make it 1 cup!
***Scalding: Many older recipes called for you to scald milk, that is, to bring it nearly to a boil and stirring. Scalding served two purposes, to kill potentially harmful bacteria in the milk, and to destroy enzymes that keep the milk from thickening in recipes. Pasteurization, however, accomplishes both of those goals, and since almost all store-bought milk in Western countries is pasteurized these days, scalding is essentially an unnecessary step. Another reason some recipes continue to call for scalded milk is that they simply want you to heat the milk first, as it will speed the cooking process, help melt butter, dissolve sugar more easily, etc.