March 28: Carrot Bundt Cake

My first dress rehearsal for Sweeney Todd at DramaTech is on Monday.  I am sleep deprived and I was at the theater for final fittings almost all day today.  So, I chose a cake from my collection of tried-and-true recipes.  It is getting close to Easter and bunnies love carrots, right?

This carrot cake recipe is from my mother's friend, Lisette.  It comes from a cookbook called Mama Never Cooked Like This by Susan Mendelson.  The book has a terrific recipe for spanikopita, too.

I didn't have time to frost the cake, so I just served the cream cheese frosting on the side!

The cake must go on!

 Next week:  Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling

March 21: Sheath Cake

When I began my U.S. Secret Service career in 1996,  I was assigned to the Jackson, Mississippi, Resident Office.  Within ten minutes of meeting the Agent-in-Charge, he told me that I was the first female special agent ever assigned in the state of Mississippi.  Approximately an hour later, during a tour of the office, this same boss pointed-out the coffee maker and said "of course, you know, it's the female agents who make the coffee..."

I was scheduled to depart for training the very next day after that tour.  Fortunately for me, during the six months I was away for training, that supervisor was promoted to another office.  Special Agent Sam Mitchell in Jackson was assigned to be my on-the-job trainer/partner when I got back to the office.  Sam Mitchell is a Vietnam Veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart.  As with most veterans of the Vietnam conflict, he never discussed his experiences there. 

Sam knew everything about our job; other special agents joked that he "slept with the manual under his pillow."  He was fastidious, followed the rules, and was the repository of an unbelievable amount of agency history (plus, a fair amount of agency gossip).   But most importantly, he treated me with the patience and kindness of a father.

Sam was the firearms instructor for our office.  USSS minimum proficiency standards for firearm accuracy are even higher than other Federal agencies, due to the likelihood that we might need to use our weapons in close proximity to one of our protectees.  All gun-carrying personnel in the office had to qualify on all of our weapons (handgun, shotgun, UZI sub-machine gun) every quarter.  Sam was the best marksman in the office and ran the range with a constant eye for safety.  Following the rules of the range and the instructions of the range master is imperative.

After about a year, Sam asked me if I would like to go to Firearms Instructor Training in Washington.  FI school is a grueling two-week course and many people wash out.  I jumped at the chance, but was filled with apprehension.  When I arrived at FI school, an instructor told me that if I passed I would be one of only two female FI's in the agency.  No pressure.

I passed the school and Sam passed the FI responsibilities to me.

One day in the office, Sam was looking for some word processing documents on floppy disks from a box of  disks in his desk drawer.  He accessed each disk and scanned the menu, then ejected the disk when it didn't contain the file he needed.  After a while, he seemed to find something important and he selected the document then sent it to his printer.  He handed the printout to me saying "this is the best cake recipe in the world, I make it every time I have to take a dessert someplace."  It was a recipe for something called Sheath Cake.  "Sheath Cake?  Does it have to do with a knife sheath?  A sheath dress?  Why is it called a SHEATH cake?"  Sam replied to just trust him and make the recipe, that it would be the best cake I ever tried.

I was surprised to get a cake recipe from Sam.  I put the recipe in a protective plastic sleeve in my binder of trusted recipes, where it has resided for more than fifteen years.  I smile, thinking of Sam, whenever I see it in my recipe book.  But I have never made his cake; I would always have other chocolate cakes to make.  So, today I made the Sheath Cake.

Sam's recipe calls for using sticks of margarine instead of butter.  I never use margarine for anything!  But, who am I to defy my training agent and the range master?

Besides the margarine, there are other unusual instructions:  add the melted margarine to the dry ingredients already in the bowl, then add the eggs and liquid ingredients.  But, the most interesting part is the frosting.  While the cake bakes, make the frosting, then as soon as the cake comes out of the oven, pour the frosting on the hot cake and immediately cover the whole thing with aluminum foil.  Then, after it cools, put the cake in the refrigerator because "it slices better when cold."  It did slice well out of the refrigerator.  The texture is dense and very moist.  It has the slightly disappointing flavor of other chocolate cakes made with only cocoa.  The pecans in the fudgy icing give it nice dimension.  However, I prefer a chocolate cake with more depth of flavor.

I hate to disagree with my training agent, but this isn't the best cake I ever tried.  I hope he'll forgive me; but of course, you know it's the female agents who bake the cakes.

Next Saturday:  Carrot Bundt Cake

March 14: Boston Cream Pie

When Keith was in high school and college he had a summer job as a performer on the Stone Mountain Scenic Railroad.  He usually played a cowboy or Confederate soldier in a historical scene alongside the train's route; the train would slow down and stop so that the passengers could watch the action.  Sometimes, he was the announcer on the train, welcoming the passengers, providing trivia about the park or narrating the mini-plays.  One of his favorite jokes from his railroad announcer days was about a southern country bumpkin learning geometry:

When the bumpkin was instructed to find the area of a circle using...

, 

the redneck became outraged and insisted "Pie are ROUND, cornbread are square!"

In honor of Pi Day (3.1415... ), my Saturday Cake is Boston Cream Pie.  Its very name claims its New England Yankee heritage.  I had been in a quandary about how to celebrate Pi Day in this year of cakes.  My college friend, Laura Simard Regan,  suggested Boston Cream Pie as the best choice.  I met Laura my freshman year at Dartmouth and I know that I can trust her judgement on this because:  She was a math major and claimed to have graduated "Pseudo Cum Laude" and she is, herself, a Connecticut Yankee.  Plus, Laura has the good judgement to now reside south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Most of our gang at Molly's Balloon in Hanover for a birthday celebration.
That's me in the blue blazer with Laura, standing, right behind me.

When choosing the Boston Cream Pie recipe I knew that making a Yankee cake required a Yankee recipe.  I chose the recipe from The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook.  The King Arthur Flour Company is located in Norwich, Vermont, right across the Connecticut river from our Alma Mater.  King Arthur sells flour and baking specialty products at kingarthurflour.com.  KAF also offers baking classes and sells freshly-baked treats at their Norwich headquarters.  

In March of 2003, I took a vacation to attend a two-day French Baguette class at KAF.  I booked a long weekend at Breakfast On the Connecticut, a bed and breakfast inn in Lyme, New Hampshire (breakfastonthect.com) and drove up from my home in Washington, DC.  On the way up, I encountered snow storm that started in Connecticut and worsened the further north I drove.  Yet, I was determined!  My planned 8-hour trip became a 15-hour trip and I arrived in Lyme exhausted.  The next morning at the Baking Education Center I discovered that only three other students had been able to make it to class, so our two-day class was shortened to one day.  It was immensely enjoyable and I would love to take more classes there sometime.  Due to the storm, my hosts at the inn offered to share their dinner that night after the class so that I wouldn't have to get out on the roads.  Did they know I was a southerner and assumed that I couldn't drive in the snow?

My Boston Cream Pie

The recipe was located in the "Pies and Pastry"section of the cookbook, under a heading called "Pastry Mavericks."   It calls for topping the assemblage with "your choice of chocolate frosting."  I chose to chocolate ganache.  As you can tell, the cake layers are a little dark; the recipe instructed to bake for 30 minutes, but at 20 minutes, I checked and found the cake layers on the verge of burning!  The filling is pastry cream, made from flour, sugar, eggs, milk and vanilla.  Keith likes the ganache and the pastry cream, but acknowledges that the cake was a little dry.

I've made a pie that is a cake.  

I make my cornbread round (as any self-respecting southerner does, unless they are in a punchline).  

I am a southerner who drives in the snow and bakes on vacation.  

So, call me a Pastry Maverick!

Next Saturday:  Sheath Cake

March 7: Lemon Cheese Cake

March 10th is Judith Allgood Page's birthday.  Mama Judy is the primary reason that I have such a varied skill set.  She is the primary reason that my mother is an accomplished artist.

After her parents divorced, my mom was raised by her mother, Maggie, and her grandparents, Mama Judy and Papa (Calvin Thomas Page).  Judy was an incredibly talented but frustrated artist.  She drew and painted on scraps of brown paper grocery sacks just to have a creative outlet.  But, she was best known for her fine and fabulous sewing.  She created couture for all of the ladies and girls in our family.  Judy made doll clothes and trimmed hats for the little gift shop in College Park that she owned with her sister Bessie.  Judy made all of my mother's clothes, her trousseau, and the trousseaux for all of the cousins.  She copied designer garments worn my Jackie Kennedy for my mom to wear to college parties.

Mom modeling a May Queen dress in her room

Cousin Betty modeling Marie Antoinette

Judy created elaborate, intricate costumes.  She was asked to make costumes for the statuary at The Church of the Immaculate Conception for the saints' feast days plus gowns for that church's May Queen (child pageant).  She made a pink Marie Antoinette costume for my mother to wear to the Roosevelt High School French Club Versailles costume party and used tea to stain the pink lace to perfectly match the taffeta.

The next year's French Club party was in a Mardi Gras theme; for that, she built a Spanish dancer costume that I recycled for one of my high school costume dances in the 1980's.  Cousin Pat commented recently that Judy "could have given Edith Head a run for her money."

Me as a Spanish Dancer c.1984

Judy made all of my baby clothes.  She made me a blue corduroy, ice-skating costume for my lessons from The Ice Capades school when I was ten-years-old.  She even lined the matching bloomer-briefs with waterproofing so that my bottom wouldn't get cold and wet when I inevitably fell!

Dorothy Hamill's got nothin' on me!

But, most importantly, she taught me how to sew.  I sit here today in the midst of production as the Costume Designer for Sweeney Todd at DramaTech Theatre at Georgia Tech (opens April 3rd).  I think about Mama Judy every time I sit down at the sewing machine.  I know she's cussing along with me when I make a mistake and have to rip out the seams, especially during the all-nighters.

Cooking lemon cheese in double boiler

So, I am taking a break from sewing today to bake her favorite cake, a lemon cheese.  She also loved coconut cake with lemon filling and Japanese fruit cake at Christmas.  Sensing a citrus pattern?  Many people think that I mean lemon cheesecake when I refer to a lemon cheese.  It is actually a simple 1-2-3-4 cake with tangy, rich lemon cheese (lemon curd) as the filling and icing.  Judy always made it with four layers to allow the most lemon filling, so I have done the same.

But now, I had better get back to the sewing room...


Next Saturday: Boston Cream Pie

February 28: Mace Cake

My Saturday Cake resolution has been an opportunity to chip away at procrastination by preparing some recipes that had interested me, but had languished in a vintage book or in a file folder of magazine clippings.  Today's mace cake recipe comes from the April 2005 issue of Gourmet and was a submission to the magazine by Cynthia Knauer from Pennsylvania.

Betty, Jackie and Pat with my mother

The recipe appealed to me for two reasons.  The first reason is that I had never heard of anyone but my cousin Betty baking with mace.  Betty was one of three sister cousins who grew up across the street from my mother in the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta.  These three sisters were much like older sisters to my mother who was an only child.  As such, they were always more like aunts to me than the type of distant cousins most people have.

Betty was pretty and blonde and always seemed sophisticated in her tastes; she was a career woman, she smoked cigarettes like a movie star, she had italian marble lamps in her living room, she collected perfume bottles on a curio shelf in her bathroom, she painted china, and traveled around the world with her china painting club.  When I was in middle school, she would invite me over to spend the night on Thanksgiving and the two of us would get up before daybreak to shop the after-Thanksgiving sales (something my mother would never do).

Betty often flavored her pound cakes with mace.  In the 1980's, my only knowledge of mace was as a spray repellant to muggers on television.  So, the first time she offered me some, I was a little apprehensive.  But the cake was as fragrant, elegant and unique as Betty herself.  She passed away five years ago last month and I was unable to attend her funeral because I was in the hospital for my first hip replacement.  I thought of her instantly when I pulled this recipe from my folder of clippings.

Elizabeth "Betty" Babb Cook

I was interested to learn that mace is actually part of the nutmeg fruit, from which both mace and nutmeg are made,  The fruit itself is about the size of a golf ball. Nutmeg, which is ground and used at our house for potato gratin and for crowning bourbon-spiked eggnog, is the woody seed at the core of the nutmeg.  Surrounding the seed, is a dark red web of fibers which is dried and ground to produce mace.  While mace does taste and smell similar to nutmeg, I think it is mild and has a more woodsy, balsam-like undertone like cardamom.

A little heavy-handed with the sprinkling lower right side!

The other reason this recipe caught my eye was its bizarre technique.  Instead of creaming the butter and sugar as the base of the batter, the eggs and sugar are beaten to triple their volume.  The milk and butter are brought to a boil as the mixer works on the eggs and sugar.  To the egg mixture, the dry ingredients are added.  Then, the hot milk and butter are poured into the batter.  I have never made a cake like this!  I always feared adding hot liquid to any mixture containing eggs lest I end up with a bowl of scrambled eggs.

No scramble resulted, of course, this is a Gourmet tested recipe. The batter was very thin, like pancake batter and it was topped before baking by a sprinkling of sugar and mace.

The sugar mixture created a golden crust as the cake baked and the kitchen was filled with buttery-rich exotic fragrance.  Daughter Autumn proclaims it the best Saturday Cake, to date.  I love the crunchy crust and the fantastic ease of the recipe - it came together in a snap and baked for 30 minutes.


I kept half of the cake for my family (and folks who visit).  The other half I plated up and took to Betty's sister, Pat.  Pat had been in the hospital for three weeks rehabilitating from a terrible fall.  She is now at home and recuperating very well.  Her daughter Liz is just about the closest thing I have to a sister as we are both only-children.  It has been a very stressful few weeks for Liz.  So after many days of relieving her for spells at the hospital, I was able to make a purely social call to Pat's house today bearing cake for the family.

Next Saturday:  Lemon Cheese Cake