When James Beard published his family’s recipe for 1-2-3-4 cake in Woman’s Day magazine in the mid-1960s, he never expected the deluge of complaint letters that followed.
The recipe for the tender-crumbed vanilla layer cake, was straightforward enough: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and four large eggs. But Beard’s mother, as he wrote when he reprinted the recipe in “American Cookery” in 1972, went a little rogue, scanting the flour down to 2¾ cups. Beard’s readers were not amused that she had changed the time-honored recipe. Even though lodging a complaint meant finding an envelope, a stamp and actually mailing a letter (as opposed to the click-send of today), people took pains to make their indignation known.
Recipe: 1-2-3-4 Cake With Mocha Buttercream
Here’s the thing, though: Beard’s mother was just doing what savvy cooks have always done. Recipes with proportion names — like pound cake, which dates back to the 18th century — are really more like guidelines. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone today making pound cake with exactly a pound each of butter, eggs, flour and sugar. The name is a helpful mnemonic, but bakers have been tinkering with the formula for generations. Beard himself added extra flour and a couple of tablespoons of liquid (rum, brandy or orange juice) to his pound cake recipe. And even Fannie Farmer bumped up the sugar for a beautifully crisp and golden top.
I kept all of this in mind when I set out to adapt my own version of the classic 1-2-3-4 cake. Like Beard, I cut back on the flour to get a light and fluffy crumb. I also dialed down the sugar — this was going to be a layer cake with a mocha buttercream frosting, and I didn’t want it veering into cloying territory.
Then I got to the butter. While I kept the total fat at one cup, I swapped in some neutral oil, which makes the crumb incredibly moist (oil always does this to cakes).
Although it’s not reflected in the name, all 1-2-3-4 cake recipes include a cup of milk, and that I traded for buttermilk because I love its subtle tang. Really, the only thing I didn’t mess with were the eggs. Four of them, as the name promises, work perfectly.
In the end, all of this tweaking raises the question: Can I still call this a 1-2-3-4 cake? Probably not, at least technically speaking. But “1-1.5-2.75-4 cake” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. If you want to send me a strongly worded message about it, go ahead — at least you won’t need a stamp.
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Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
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