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Well this looks like fun. I hope it’s really pretty!

White Part. – 2 cups white sugar, 1 cup butter, 3 cups flour, 1/2 cup sweet milk, 1 teaspoon cream tartar, 1/2 teaspoon soda, whites of 8 eggs. Flavor with lemon.

Red part – 1 cup red sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups flour, whites of 4 eggs, 1/4 cup sweet milk, 1/2 teaspoon cream tartar, 1/4 teaspoon soda, 1 cup seeded raisins, floured and mixed in the dough. Put half the white dough in the pan first, then all the red and the other half of the white.

(You can find the original recipe in the facsimile copy reproduced in Tom Kelchner’s new book The Story of the 1881 Cumberland Valley Cook and General Recipe Book)

Let’s see…four cups of flour sounds like a lot for my regular cake pan. Perhaps it is more like a bundt cake pan? What kind of cake pans did they use back in the 1870s? A google search for Cake pan 1870s doesn’t give much in the way of text results, but the pictures do seem to be bundt-shaped. Of course many sites seem to list the bundt pan as an invention of the 1950s, but I guess that is the ‘brand name’ history and the concept is much older.

Well… I want picturesque watermelon slices out of this recipe and watermelons are simply not bundt shaped. So I am going to divide the parts of this among my regular cake pans and put them in the oven at 350. Divided among three pans this should make a beautiful 3 layer cake. Should. Have I learned that altering recipes may not give optimal results? No, I have not. Anyway, these old recipes are more like guidelines, so I am going to do what I want.

However, what shall I do about the ingredient “red sugar”? I have never heard of this before. Looking online, a lot of places sell it as a Chinese food product. I am not clear if it is just brown sugar or if it is sugar with a bit of food coloring added. To get in the watermelon spirit, I have decided to add about 5 drops of red food coloring to the appropriate amount of brown sugar.

I assume when they say whites of eight eggs, that they should be beaten til fluffy.  Here they are ready to stir in…

…as are the floured raisins.

The two white cakes took about 28 minutes to cook at 350 degrees, and the red part only 25 – probably because I cooked it by itself.  So far, results are looking pretty good. These cakes seem easy to work with – not too crumbly and easily removed from the pan.

My watermelon dream cake needs icing, so I’ve used a modern recipe for a white buttercream icing tinted green with food coloring.

Reviews: “A nice dense cake” “Not too sweet”

My rating 4.5/5 stars. I really liked this one. There are perhaps a few things I would do differently, like try to add some real (or is it fake?) watermelon flavor to the red part. And, you know, maybe chocolate chips instead of raisins. All together I’d call it a success and something that could easily be recreated for a summertime party.

– Rachael Zuch of Zuch Design