August 22: Virginia Hall's Date Cake

As I have been working non-stop on costumes for Calendar Girls, I wanted to bake a simple cake this week.  I chose Virginia Hall's Date Cake prepared in a tube pan with a simple glaze, instead of a layer cake with frosting.

The recipe is from Our Favorites, a cookbook published by the Woman's Society of Christian Service, East Lake Methodist Church in 1958.  East Lake is a section of Atlanta which is most notable for the East Lake Golf Club where Bobby Jones starting playing as a young boy.  East Lake contains many lovely homes some dating back as far as the 19th century.  The neighborhood is now a thriving, family-friendly, in-town enclave.

Similar to the Opti-Mrs cookbook I used for the Mocha Loaf Cake (July 25), this cookbook was locally published and contains advertisements from area businesses, long-since shuttered.  It also contains occasional helpful hints and poems.  One such poem appears on the same page as the Date Cake recipe;

Do you wish the world were better?
let me tell you what to do;
Set a watch upon your actions,
Keep them always straight and true;
Rid your mind of selfish motives,
Let your thoughts be clear and high,
You can make a little Eden,
Of the sphere you occupy. 

-- Ellis Wheeler Wilcox

Good advice on the same page as a good recipe.  Plus, later in the chapter on cakes is a "Fool-Proof Caramel Frosting" recipe that I might need to consult for a final attempt at a caramel cake in the coming months.

The date cake turned out very well.  it is made with chopped dates, chopped pecans, orange juice, zest, and buttermilk.  The flavors are well balanced, and no one component overwhelms.   I will need to use more flour to dredge the dates and nuts next time, because they sank a little in the batter.  The buttermilk makes this cake very moist.  In addition, a glaze of sugar, orange juice and zest is drizzled over the cake while it is still warm.

Right now, the sphere I occupy is full of costumes (more on that in my next post), so the Eden I make will have to be very little indeed...

Next Saturday: The Women's Institute Centenary Celebration Cake

August 15: Seven Layer Cake

Seven Layer Bars...  Seven Layer Dip...  Seven Layer Cake...
Why the cook's attraction to the number seven?  Is it magical?  Biblical?

Over the years, I had seen seven-layer cakes at restaurants and bakeries but I had never eaten any. Recipes for the cake appear often in cookbooks of Eastern European specialties and Passover specialties.  I remember seeing a loaf-shaped, seven-layer cake in the Hickory Farms catalogs that were mailed to my grandparents every year.  The thin layers of cake with thin layers of chocolate between the layers always looked appealing.

An efficient, modern kitchen

Appealing is also a great descriptor for the cookbook from which I plucked this recipe.  The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook, Copyright 1950, Edited by Ruth Berolzheimer has 974 pages of recipes and kitchen advice arranged with hundreds of photos illustrating same.  It has tabbed pages, like an encyclopedia, so that you can skip to the section you need.  There is even a tabbed section on "Your Refrigerator Desserts" and one for "Your Quick Dinners for the Woman in a Hurry."  There are recipes involving fillings to put into "bologna cups;"  the cup that forms when a piece of bologna curls up when heated in a frying pan.  It also contains the following poetic introduction:

"The personality of a cookbook is as apparent as it is important.  It is composed of known and stable ingredients with unknown and elusive ones to make a mixture as familiar, friendly and exhilarating as a pine woods on a summer morn."

Are we just talking about a cookbook here?  Or something more profound?

The Seven Layer Cake recipe calls for seven eggs (evidently, each layer needs its own), powdered sugar, and only one cup of flour.  The frosting uses three more eggs and is cooked in a double boiler.  Overall, the frosting  turned out very nicely.  It has the consistency, smooth but soft enough to be self-leveling, that I think my caramel frosting ought to have.

I don't own seven identical 8" cake pans, so I invested $7 at the dollar store for a set of pans.  The layers turned out very evenly by using a disher (levered scoop) to measure an even amount into each pan.  The cake layers were flexible and easy to remove from the pan due to the highly "eggy" batter. Not surprisingly, the cake did taste a little eggy and had a bouncy spongy texture, a little sturdier than a regular sponge cake.  This texture was a drawback to the cake according to everyone in our household.

Layering the cake with the frosting was not difficult due to the smooth texture of the frosting.  No magic here.  It just required the patience of Job to keep the layers from slipping out of place as the chocolate "set."

Next Saturday:  Date Cake

August 8: Orange Cake

I am glad that I chose a simple, straightforward cake this weekend.  Autumn and Colin start back to school on Monday and there were end-of-summer haircuts and supply-shopping trips to accomplish.  In addition, I had production meetings about the play for which I am designing costumes, Calendar Girls at Georgia Ensemble Theatre.  The show opens on September 10th and this weekend I made my costume presentations for approval of my renderings.  Now, I can hit the ground running on my designs.  It is set at the turn of the millennium, so I will be able to shop-and-alter rather than build most of the costumes.

This recipe is from my folder of magazine clippings; it was published in the January 2004 issue of Gourmet in a feature about sour cream, Culture Club.  The cake is a single-layer, square cake without frosting.  It is flavored with fresh-squeezed orange juice and orange zest.

The texture is absolutely perfect, due to the sour cream, no doubt.  It is moist and not "crumby."  It's a delicious cake, but its delicate orange flavor almost cries out for a glaze or frosting.  The family was unanimous is wishing it was, to quote Colin, "oranigier."  I am not sure if it was the fact that oranges are off-season and had come from South America or if the cake is supposed to have a very subtle taste.  I will try the recipe again, adding more orange zest and maybe I'll cheat a little by adding a spoonful of concentrated orange juice to the fresh juice.

Next Saturday:  Seven Layer Cake

August 1: Caramel Cake III, The Revenge of Caramel Cake

I had originally planned to make a cake called "Hat-in-the-Ring" cake from Betty Talmadge's Lovejoy Plantation Cookbook for this weekend.  My mother was friends with Betty Talmadge back in the late 1970's and 1980's. The book is full of great recipes and menus for entertaining; it includes instructions on roasting a pig and making Brunswick Stew for a crowd of 100+.  Betty spent a lot of time entertaining at Lovejoy Plantation as the wife of the governor and U.S. Senator, Herman Talmadge.  Lovejoy Plantation was located in the same area as the fictional Tara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, and Betty bought the facade of Tara used for the movie of GWTW and later donated it to the Margaret Mitchell Museum here in Atlanta.

The cake recipe is one that I had chosen back in January.  As I find recipes, I place an index card with the name of the recipe into an envelope and then choose from that envelope each week.  I thought that a "Hat -in-the-Ring" cake would be a perfect choice for this week of the first Republican debate since so many Republicans have thrown their "hats into the ring."  However, when I looked over the recipe this week, I noticed that it was Betty's own version of a Lane Cake - with raisins, bourbon, and pecans, just like I recently made on July 19.


What to do?


Luckily, during our trip last week to scout-out colleges, I found a great cookbook, Rumford Complete Cook Book (1941), at an antique store in Thomasville, North Carolina.  Thomasville is the birthplace of Thomasville Furniture and they have a large chair sculpture (about two stories tall) right in the middle of downtown.

The cookbook was formerly owned by Mrs. William Bowman of Greensboro, North Carolina.  It was published by the Rumford Chemical Works of Rumford, Rhode Island, a manufacturer of baking powder.  Rumford chemical issued pamphlets with recipes and cooking tips starting in the 1850's.  They published those recipes in a Complete Cook Book starting in 1908.

There are many pages in the cookbook which got much use and attention from Mrs. Bowman.  Inside, there are newspaper clippings of recipes "to stretch meat points" during the war years.  The best parts of the book are the recipes that she wrote on the end papers and inside covers of the book.  One, for her gingerbread, seemed to get the most use, but there are great-looking ones for ice box rolls, yeast bread, and apple sauce cake.

One recipe, that Mrs. Bowman clipped from the newspaper and cellophane-taped to the back cover was for a caramel cake.  It is a recipe for Easy Mix Cake and Caramel Frosting from Mary Lee Taylor. Mrs. Taylor (a pseudonym for an advertising copywriter named Erma Proetz) had a radio program on NBC called "Story of the Week" which always contained a "Recipe of the Week" sponsored by Pet Milk.  Mrs. Taylor was billed as a "home economist" and "nutritionist" for Pet Milk.  Sounds almost like the plot of the movie, Christmas in Connecticut, to me.  This recipe was originally broadcast on March 13, 1948.

The recipe, as written, is for a single layer cake and contains Pet Milk, of course.  I multiplied the recipe and made mine in three layers in my quest for a perfect caramel layer cake.  I used Pet Milk and stuck to the rest of the recipe.  A recipe by an ad copywriter?  Wow, it shows.  The proportion of baking powder to flour was alarmingly high.  The instructions to mix all the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients and shortening all at once then add the eggs is contrary to everything I know about assembling a cake.  The cake was full of large air bubble pockets, and rose too quickly, caused by the baking powder and by not creaming the fat and sugar together, first.  The texture was very fragile with a large crumb and it fell apart removing it from the pan.  Dreadful!

The ugliest slice of cake.  Ever.

The frosting, on the other hand, turned out pretty well.  It has a smooth texture, not gritty and a very light color.  It doesn't have a strong enough flavor of burnt sugar and it is exceedingly sweet.  But, all caramel frostings are super sweet, to me.  I looked back at the clipping taped to the book cover and noticed that Mrs. Bowman had taped  it on top of her handwritten recipe for chocolate cake filling, so I am now thinking that she saved this recipe for the frosting, not the crazy cake.

My quest for a successful caramel cake recipe must continue, although I am not sure how much more effort I have the fortitude to invest; I feel like I am throwing good sugar after bad.  Maybe just one more attempt at a caramel cake?

So (without claiming to be a nutritionist or home economist) that is my "Story of the Week."


Next Saturday: Orange Cake