2015 Re-Bake and the Recipe for my New Year

Yesterday, I thought for quite a while about resolutions.  The Cake on Saturday resolution of the past year has changed my life.

Many of the recipes that had been bookmarked-but-languishing on my shelves of classic cookbooks became part of this weekly experiment.  The most successful attempts:  Victoria Sponge Sandwich, Cherry Cake, Mace Cake, Feud Cake, Mexican Chocolate Cake (which I will add to my repertoire as a cupcake recipe), Queen of Sheba, Pecan Molasses Bundt Cake with Bourbon Glaze, Basil Pound Cake, Chocolate Ganache Frosting (July 4), Five-Flavor Cake, Hummingbird Cake, Sweet Autumn Cake (without all the crumbs, caramel and nuts on top), Myer's Rum Cake, frosting from Peanut Butter Cake Supreme, and The Chocoholic.

Early on, I was worried about finding the time to bake each week.  But, I was surprised to find that with each Saturday's adventure, it became easier and easier to make time.  I found comfort in making family recipes just because it was a Saturday and not relegating them only to "special occasions."  I came to grips with repeat fiascoes in the form of my burnt-sugar-nemesis, Caramel Cake.  As a result, I also discovered that my husband's encouragement and an Allgood pitch out of the back door can allow me to move-on from, possibly, any failure.  

Best of all, I have had the opportunity to share my false steps and triumphs with Granna each week when I took her a slice of Saturday cake on my visits to the nursing home.  

She's the one who got this whole thing stirred-up in the first place!

Now, what will I do with my Saturdays in the New Year?

December 26: Japanese Fruit Cake

Japanese Fruit Cake is the traditional Christmas cake for my mother's side of the family, though it is not a fruitcake.  Come to think of it, I am not even sure why it is claimed to be Japanese.  But I won't question tradition because it is absolutely one of my favorite cakes; spicy, buttery, fruity and rich.  I don't remember celebrating a Christmas without it.  I even have a Japanese Fruit Pie recipe, containing all of the same fruits and flavors, that is nearly as good.

The cake contains two layers of plain butter (1-2-3-4) cake alternated with two layers of spice cake containing allspice, cinnamon, cloves and raisins "chopped fine."  In between the layers is a lemon and coconut filling which requires natural coconut.

Alternating layers with filling

The recipe calls for "1 good-sized cocoanut, grated."  Natural coconut is perfect because it is not pre-sweetened like commercial, flaked coconut, so the filling is not overly sweet.  However, opening a coconut, peeling, then grating the meat is a chore.  There were a couple of years in the 1990s when Mom and I couldn't find nary a coconut in the grocery stores...

One year, we had to buy three coconuts in three different trips to three different stores.  First, we searched several stores, finding no coconuts.  Then, each time we found one that sounded good, i.e. heavy and sounding sloshy-full of coconut water, we took it home, cracked it, and found the meat moldy, smelly or both.  That year we gave up and bought flaked coconut and were able to finish the cake in time for Christmas.  The next year the same thing happened on our first attempt to find a suitable coconut, so we gave-in to the flaked stuff and cut our losses.  Ever since then, the prospect of buying a coconut at Christmas becomes a catalyst for much well-wishing, many prayers, and crossed fingers.

These days, I think that more people cook with natural coconut.  Plus, I live in an area of town with a large Asian community, so I was pretty confident in my ability to find a decent specimen.  I found one at my neighborhood grocery on my first attempt and it turned out to be a winner.  The way Mama Judy cracked a coconut was to drive an ice pick into two or three of the eyes of the coconut to poke holes to the center, and then turn it eyes-down on a glass and leave it to drain.  Keith had his drill in the house for another job, so with a clean drill bit we created the holes.   No stabbing required.  I then placed the drained coconut in a hot oven (about 400 degrees) and checked on it every few minutes.  The heat caused the cocoa-brown hard shell to crack.  After removing the shell, the thin brown inner shell could be removed with a vegetable peeler revealing the gorgeous white nut meat.

In most cases the nut meat cracks along with the outer casing, but this time, it came out whole like a big, sweet, oily pearl.  I stood back and looked at it for a few minutes; it seemed almost a shame to cut it up and grate it.  Although, maybe I was just dreading the grating.

There is nothing more dangerous to the skin on one's knuckles than having to grate coconut.  The grating was always one of my jobs during the cake baking when I was little.  This kid greased the pans with butter, cut the wax paper circles for the bottoms of the pans, dredged the raisins with flour, and grated the coconut.  I grew up with both a respect and a fear of the box grater.  If the cakes hadn't always been such a delicious reward for the dangerous work, I might have been terrified by the grater into adulthood.

It has been years since I have made a Japanese Fruit Cake on my own.  Mom usually makes it at her home and brings it over on Christmas day.  When my mom gave me a copy of Southern Cooking by Mrs. Dull for Christmas 1989, she had written helpful advice on page 231, the Japanese Fruit Cake recipe.  Her notations told me how long to bake the cakes, how much juice a lemon is expected to yield, and how to tell when the filling is the right consistency.  Mom always used the filling as the frosting on the outside of the cake.  I made the filling according to Mrs. Dull, but I ended up with only enough filling to go between the layers.  Mom had forgotten to note in my book that the recipe needed doubling.  I didn't have another coconut prepared to make more filling at the last minute.

Mrs. Dull's recipe instructed to cover the cake with white icing.  Seven minute frosting would be too sweet, and I knew that Autumn liked the spice cake layers with Universal White Frosting.  The Universal White Frosting recipe is from Stressed is Just Desserts Spelled Backwards by Sheryl Meddin and Bennett Frisch (see Myers's Rum Cake, November 7).  It is an amalgam of buttercream and cream cheese frostings and it goes very well with any spice cake.

So, my resulting cake was pretty and delicious, but not exactly the exotic, fruity traditional Christmas cake covered in fruit filling that we always have.  Maybe not a groundbreaking new tradition, but it was a festive Saturday Cake for Boxing Day.  I wrote a note in my cookbook to double the filling recipe and put the grater safely back in the cabinet without incident.

Next Saturday: A Review of a Year of Saturday Cakes

October 31: Caramel Cake IV, The Final Chapter

Halloween is supposed to be scary.  So, what better time to embark on my fourth attempt to make a caramel cake.  Right?

Saturday started out with such potential:  I had already found a good recipe for the cake layers that had enough body for the heavy caramel (Nathalie Dupree's from Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking).  I made three lovely, level layers and set them out to cool on wire racks.  So far, so good.

The most promising development, since my last attempt, was an intriguing new recipe for the caramel icing.  I did not want to get my hopes up, especially because there was rain in the forecast for Sunday and the rising humidity could spell disaster for the caramel.

My friend, Ellen, took pity on me after my previous battles with caramel frosting and sent me this recipe.  Ellen is a native of Alabama and has many memories of the homemade caramel cakes served at funerals, church suppers and pot luck dinners over the years.  She has never made a caramel cake, but her family's southern pedigree is solid.  Ellen's parents own a large farm and Ellen inherited a green thumb.  She is the first person of my acquaintance who has successfully grown peonies in Georgia.  She is a career woman who values pragmatism while at the same time revering southern traditions.  A few years ago, after seeing a picture in the local newspaper of the local DAR chapter (picture a bunch of older ladies in hats wearing socks and orthopedic sandals with their dresses), she suggested that we "block rush" the DAR to shake up the establishment a bit, or at least inject a little style.

Ellen found the recipe for caramel icing in her recipe box.  It was one of her grandmother's recipes, handwritten on the back of a piece of paper with an Enfamil (baby formula) logo along with a note to "call Lou."  Ellen's grandmother, Christine Pinson, was known as "Blackie."  Blackie got her nickname in nursing school when nursing candidates were referred to as Miss (surname).  Blackie entered nursing school with her sister, and the confusion caused by two Misses Pinson led to the need for two official nicknames.  Christine with dark hair became "Blackie" and her sister, the blonde, became "Whitey."  Blackie became a public health nurse, hence the Enfamil paper.  Lou, also a nurse, was probably the source for the caramel icing recipe.

The recipe called for browning sugar in a skillet, then adding that to a mixture of evaporated milk, sugar and oleo (margarine).  In spite of my hesitation about using margarine, I tried it.  The recipe called for it, so I figured it was the accurate thing to do.  However, I also set some unsalted butter and a second round of measured ingredients aside to make a butter batch, just in case.

The first batch of sugar, I burnt in the iron skillet.

The next batch of sugar turned out fine and I moved on to bring the full mixture with milk and oleo to "soft ball" stage (240 degrees).  Or so I intended.  The batch never reached soft ball before burning to the bottom of the pan to such an extent, that I felt sure that the pan was ruined.

Results of the second batch, as black as my mood and potentially as dangerous.

So, after working up a sweat scrubbing the pan, I decided to try again.  By this time, the trick-or-treaters were out roaming the streets and I decided to blame goblins for the failure of that second batch.  After adjustments to the burner temperature, checking the accuracy of my candy thermometer and an internal pep talk, I was ready to try again.  Keith, meanwhile, had grown weary of my sighs and wary of my increasing frustration level.  He said "you know, you really don't have to make a caramel cake.  It's not like your Granna made them all of the time, she just said that her mother made them on Saturdays. I might even love you more if you don't make a caramel cake, ever.  I hate to see you like this."

The third batch, let me just be succinct, was another profound failure.  

Despite my attempts to remedy all of the possible errors from the second batch, I ended up scrubbing and scraping burnt sugar-tar from my favorite sauce pan.  There was grumbling, cussing and a welling-up of tears before I reached the zenith of my frustration.  I felt like Anthony Michael Hall's character in The Breakfast Club whose elephant lamp wouldn't light-up when he pulled the trunk.  I should be able to do this.

Why can't I make a caramel cake?  Why won't it light up when I pull the trunk?

Come and get it, opossums and birds!

At that moment of emotional overflow, I walked into the dining room and saw the pretty cake layers anticipating their icing.  Something snapped.  I told Keith to grab a bite of one of the cakes before it was too late, then I scooped up the cakes and marched out the door.  Then, I violently threw the cakes into the back yard watching them smash to bits against the old swing set.  

Let me backtrack briefly to remind you that I come from a proud line of women whose ultimate expression of anger toward an inanimate object is to throw it into the back yard.  My Mama Judy, in a particularly trying season in the 1950s, got so annoyed with an iron, that she hurled it out the back door - narrowly missing poor Papa's head.  The iron lay, rejected, in the backyard until Papa secretly picked it up and disposed of it sight-unseen by Judy.  There have been times in my life, and my mother's life, when throwing that offending toaster,  immersion blender, or computer mouse out the back door and leaving it there is the only alternative.  My cousin, Liz, refers to this state as "having a case of the Allgood Red-Ass."  I am pretty sure, based on the anecdotal evidence, that all of the Allgood girls have succumbed to the condition at some point.

I followed my attack of the "ARA" with a glass of wine as I sat on the couch and promised Keith that I wouldn't be attempting any more caramel cakes.  Besides, on Sunday I visited Granna and asked her why she thought my caramel cakes didn't work.  She admitted that she didn't remember ever making one.  So, I finally got a treat after all my tricky caramel disasters.  

The toothpick comes out clean, and I am done.

Next Saturday: Myers's Rum Cake

June 6: Spice Islands (?) Cake

Last week, while shopping for vintage books at a thrift store, our son, Colin, found a treat for me.  He found a set of activity books from the American Girls Collection for their character named Samantha who lived at the turn of the twentieth century.  Apparently, American Girls' Samantha also enjoys cooking, making crafts, trying-on new outfits and producing plays.  Sadly, there was only one cake recipe in the cook book from the set.  The recipe is for gingerbread, which reminded me of my Spice Islands Cake.

The Spice Islands Cake is one of my signature cakes.  I developed the recipe in order to replicate the delicious taste of the Allgood Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with whipped cream on top.  It was one of the recipes I created and tested when I was living in Washington, DC.  Whenever I had a difficult day (or week) at work, I would cook to relax.  I would take the resulting cookies, cakes, etc. to my office the next day.  I made many versions of this cake trying to get the spices, texture and appearance right.  I was a regular reader of Southern Living magazine and in 2004, I decided I was ready to submit this recipe to their annual recipe contest.

At that time, I called this "Pineapple Spice Layer Cake."  I obsessed over getting the written instructions simple and foolproof.  I even gave the recipe to a tester or two to see if they could follow the instructions I had written and arrive at an appropriate result.

The recipe uses three different types of sugar (brown, light brown and confectioners) and that year the contest was sponsored by Domino Sugar.  I figured that by specifying "Domino" sugars in my recipe, I would be a shoe-in for a brand-sponsored prize, if not a grand prize.

I did not win.

After I moved back home to Atlanta, I submitted this recipe again to the Southern Living contest.  But this was after my trip to Indonesia, my diagnosis of gluten intolerance, and a couple of years of sour grapes reading the "winning" recipes in issues of the magazine.  I decided that "Pineapple Spice Layer Cake"  was a boring name and that the name had cost me dearly in the judges' assessment.  For my second submission, in an attempt to take back some power from Indonesia, I named the cake Spice Islands.  I thought that it was clever.

Layers showing filling

I still did not win.

Everyone loves the cake, so the name must be my impediment to recipe contest glory.  Keith believes that my mistake in renaming the cake was two-fold; I named it after a place where I suffered terribly, and it could be confused with the Spice Island brand of herbs and spices.  I am now thinking of calling it Equator Cake since pineapples, cinnamon, ginger and cloves originated and a principally grown there.

Close-up of frosting

This (insert name here) cake consists of three layers of cake, with pineapple filling that is like a pineapple curd.  It is covered with a thick layer of stabilized whipped cream that contains even more pineapple.

Whether I submit this recipe to a contest again, or not, it is absolutely a winner.  The cake is moist and tender.  The filling is tangy with loads of pineapple flavor.  The whipped cream frosting has the creaminess to balance the spice and fruity tang of the cake and filling.  I wish all of my "pastimes" worked out this well.

Next Saturday:  Basil Pound Cake

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

January 24: Allgood Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Up until my fourth-grade year, I had been a Montessori child.  I began public school that year highly prepared academically and behaviorally.  I was, however, wholly unprepared for lunch in a school cafeteria.  My mother had been sending me to Montessori school with a lovely, balanced, healthy lunch every day.  I carried a hand-painted, metal lunch pail filled with good food and a cloth napkin (color coordinated with the pail).  My lunches had contained sandwiches on whole grain bread along with Dannon yogurt that had been frozen the night before to defrost by lunchtime.  My homemade lunches never contained any treats but fruit.  In an effort to fit in, I left my lunch pail at home and opted to buy lunch and milk at my new school.

I was pretty surprised when a square slice of pizza served with canned corn and my choice of (chocolate!) milk was handed to me on a plastic tray by a lady in a hair net.  But I will never forget the shock I received the first day the cafeteria offered Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.  My homeroom teacher read the lunch menu aloud during morning announcements and I was thrilled that one of my absolute favorite desserts was on offer that day!  At lunchtime, I stared down the line of stainless steel and glass, past whatever entree and side dish was being served and saw the craziest-looking Pineapple Upside-Down Cake I had ever seen.  It was just YELLOW CAKE with some pineapple slices and sad cherries!  Dubious, I tasted the alleged Pineapple Upside-Down Cake anyway.  More is the pity.  That cake tasted just as boring as it looked; it wasn't real Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

I chalked-up the disappointment to the public school experience, alongside field day and having to learn to play "Suicide is Painless" on the recorder.  It took years of real-world experience for me to realize that the divine upside-down cake I had eaten before fourth grade was an outlier made only by the ladies in my family.

My great-grandmother, Judith Allgood Page, made a dessert every Sunday for midday dinner.  It was usually a simple dessert like a chess pie, banana pudding or strawberry shortcake made with store-bought sponge cake cups.  But in the wintertime, she often made Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and served it with whipped cream.  Her cake was made with rich, spicy gingerbread cake and a gooey layer of glazed pineapple rings and cherries.  When I was growing up there was a delicious gingerbread cake mix made by Dromedary that made upside-down cake easier.

When I started cooking on my own, I searched for the Dromedary mix in its distinctively retro orange/yellow/white box.  I had a terrible time trying to find it, so I gave up and started a quest for an alternative from scratch.  In the October 2000 issue of Gourmet magazine, I found the perfect recipe in the "Letters From Our Readers" section.  Mrs. Lindsay's Gingerbread Cake recipe makes my ideal Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

Pan prepped with butter, brown sugar,
pineapples, cherries

My mother always made her upside down cake in a square pan.  A square pan seems more gingerbread-y than a round pan or the cast iron frying pan some upside-down cake recipes recommend.  As I prepared to bake, I was disappointed not to find my square cake pan.  (Some of my excessive collection of cooking implements are packed away in storage.  Our last house had an enormous kitchen and my collection had grown to a size that our current home cannot possibly support.)

The final product

I figured, the square pan is packed away and more cake is never a problem so, I doubled the recipe and used my 9x13x2" pan instead.



The entire house smells like a warm, spicy heaven.  I served each slice with lightly-sweetened whipped cream.

There is plenty for leftovers; some for the neighbors and a special slice for Mom.

Next Saturday:  Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake

January 10: Caramel Cake

Caramel cake is one of the quintessential Southern cakes of pot-lucks and small-town-lore.  There are cooks across this region whose kitchen bona fides are entirely based on the irresistibility of their caramel cakes.  I'll bet that my great-grandmother, Lexie, was one of those cooks.  However, it has never been a cake that I had any desire to bake.

I am sure that there is a "nature vs. nurture" aspect to each person's connection to food.  Objectively speaking, is it appealing visually and does it taste good to you? And, equally as important, what were you fed as you were growing up and developing your tastes?  Does the memory of the person who taught you to make it cause you prejudice?  I'll admit it.  I have never had a caramel cake that I thought was anything special.  Possibly, it is due to the fact that my mother and my mother's grandmother never made caramel cakes and they are the ladies who taught me most of what I know about baking.  Therefore, I don't have a nostalgic connection to caramel cake (even though I love caramel).

Honestly, I always found carmel cakes to be cloyingly sweet, ofttimes with caramel icing that is sandy in texture.  Even caramel cakes that have a smooth-looking icing often end up with a mouth-feel like tile grout.  I have never been impressed by a caramel cake, not once.  I want a caramel icing that is worthy of the lovely flavor of the carefully burnt sugar.  I want the icing to resemble chocolate ganache in density and luxuriant texture.  

On Saturday I started my first carmel cake with a minimum of research, an overabundance of confidence, and the lack of an essential piece of equipment.

Just before I graduated from college, my parents gave me my first new cookbook.  I already had family cookbooks that had been handed-down, Mom's recipes that she had hand-written on sheets of notebook paper, and my own collection of magazine clippings.  But on my birthday in 1991, my parents presented me with an autographed copy of New Southern Cooking  by Nathalie Dupree.  Nathalie Dupree is a cooking legend in Georgia having taught at Rich's [department store] Cooking School, hosted her own cooking show on public television and owned successful restaurants specializing in southern cuisine.  Why not try Nathalie?

So, when her caramel cake recipe in New Southern Cooking stated "There is a grainy texture to the icing since the last batch of sugar is never dissolved," I moved on.  But, I didn't go too far.  I referred instead to her recipe in Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking.  There were a few differences between the two recipes, and I thought that the one without the disclaimer about "grainy" icing was preferable.  In preparation last week, I checked the kitchen drawer to confirm that I had my candy thermometer; the recipe requires that the caramel be at 240 degrees, or soft ball stage, when you begin to cool and beat the icing.

I decided to go whole hog on the carmel and make the cake in four layers, allowing for the maximum caramel-to-cake ratio.  The cake layers from Nathalie's recipe came out beautifully, with a smooth, fine texture.  Then I started the icing.  In two heavy pots, I started melting the sugar and heating the second cream-and-sugar component, using separate spoons and a watchful eye.  Then, I reached into the drawer for the thermometer so I would be ready at the crucial "soft ball" moment.  Removing the "protective" plastic sheath, I found that the glass of the outside vacuum-sealed tube had been broken off at the end. [Expletives Deleted]  In anger, I violently threw the thermometer into the garbage can.

It is appropriate to tell you now, Allgood girls have a history of throwing any household gadget into the backyard in a fit of frustration when it ceases to live up to expectations.  Family members know to exercise caution whenever cussing is heard from the kitchen.  You never know when an iron, frying pan or blender might come flying out of the back door.  Alas, I have no pictures of the offending thermometer to post here, but I also don't have a thermometer in my yard.  I recovered, feeling proud of my emotional restraint, and decided to barrel ahead and judge the stage of the candy by classically testing it, dropping a little into ice water to see if it forms a soft ball.  

I arrived at my assessed soft ball stage, cooled the caramel, and tasted the results.  The flavor was amazing; buttery, deep and rich.  But, at this point the caramel was too thin to spread.  I proceeded to the next step and beat the caramel using a stand mixer.  Nathalie's recipe states that the caramel should be the consistency of peanut butter and that heavy cream could be added during the beating process to improve the consistency and make it spreadable.  My caramel was never the consistency of peanut butter, but after much worrying on top of the frustration of the broken thermometer, I gave up and iced the cake with my caramel concoction.  The icing that resulted was grainy and slowly traveled from wherever I spread it to someplace it wanted to go.  I fought a losing battle trying to make the cake look pretty.

Overall , my family thought the cake tasted delicious.  Some of the reviewers thought that four layers threw the caramel quantity over-the-top.

Let me just say that I was again disappointed by a carmel cake...

I have learned several significant lessons, though:  

First, actually inspect your tools before you start on a project.  A cursory glance in a drawer will not do.  

Second, I must have no idea how soft ball stage caramel is supposed to look.  I can count on one hand the number of times I have ever made candy and I never made caramel before.  I absolutely need a thermometer until I know better.

Third, there IS such a thing as too-much-caramel.  Next time I will only make three cake layers.

In a few weeks I will attempt a second caramel cake.  In the meantime, I am off to buy a new candy thermometer and do a little recipe research...

Next Saturday:  Victoria Sponge Cake from The Upstairs Downstairs Cookery Book in honor of the new season of Downton Abbey