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.
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| 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."
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