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

October 3: Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream

Maggie Angeline Page Hill, wearing Blaine's Airborne Wings on a suit made by Mama Judy
in her engagement photo for the Atlanta newspapers.  The suit matched her blue eyes.

This weekend, my cake is one of my own recipes.  I developed this recipe for a Lemon Layer Cake with a tangy, buttercream frosting years ago when I was entertaining the idea of having a cupcake and tea shop upon my retirement from the Secret Service.  I have made cupcakes from the recipe for birthday parties, showers, and I even made hundreds of them for a fundraiser for Georgia Shakespeare.  It is an absolute favorite of everyone in our family.

Maggie with my mom at the beach

Any dessert with lemon has always been a favorite in our family and perhaps that is because it was a favorite flavor of Mama Judy who did the baking when my mother and her mother were growing up.  Tuesday the 6th is the 95th anniversary of my grandmother, Maggie's birth.

Mama Mag never did much cooking, but she made delicious cornbread and she loved to eat.  She always asked to go to restaurants that served the things she loved but never got at home; Judy cooked traditional southern dishes and baked perfect southern desserts.  But frog's legs, fried chicken livers, raw oysters and fried oysters all had to be enjoyed by Maggie when she went out to eat.  She had eclectic taste in foods and no fear of trying new things.

Maggie was not a traditional grandmother to me.  She lived with Mama Judy and Papa and they filled the "grandparent" roles when I visited.  Mama Mag was more like a playmate to me.  We sat on the floor and played  card games like Crazy 8's or Battle using sticks of Fruit Stripe chewing gum to place our bets.  She let me play in her makeup and with her costume jewelry.  She would sing and clap her hands to songs on the radio or music played by bands at the mall.  When I was a teenager, she would joke with me like she probably did with her girlfriends as teens.  We would be driving down the street and she would see a punk with a mohawk, or a hobo, and say to me "well, there goes your last chance..." then she would start to roll the window down to call him over.

In 1940, she was pictured in the Atlanta Journal at a jitterbug dance contest in Grant Park.  She was one of the contestants and she kept the newspaper clipping pressed in the family bible along with other flat keepsakes like her school diplomas, blood donation awards and corsages from who-knows-what occasion.  My mother turned the clipping into a collage for me as a reminder of my uninhibited and fun-loving grandmother.  Maggie always lived in-the-moment and didn't really care what people thought (much to her mother's chagrin in her rebellious youth).

"The sky's the limit and there ain't no sky" reads the caption from the Atlanta Journal

 Maggie was the luckiest person I have ever known, probably because she did live optimistically in the moment and she believed that she would win.  She won every contest or raffle she entered.  When I was in high school, on Friday nights, I would go with Maggie to weekly bingo at the retirement high-rise where she lived.  Friday night bingo with my grandmother?  Maybe Maggie was right to think that those undesirable fellows on the side of the road could have been my "last chance" at getting a date.  She won bingo every Friday.  The other residents hated to see her coming, I'll bet, because she not only won the games but usually the door prize raffle, too.

I never won a bingo game there, but I did win the door prize one night.  It was the first thing I had ever won.  The prize was a cake, donated by a local bakery for Branan Towers bingo night.

Maggie on our Florida road trip, 1987

Probably since the place was opened in the 1960s, Maggie had always wanted to visit Disney World, but she had never had an opportunity to go.  In the summer before I left for college, I took Mama Mag on a road trip to Orlando, just the two of us.  We did everything she most wanted to see:  the killer whale show at Sea World (she was disappointed when we didn't get splashed), Disney World (she loved the runaway mine train) and we walked around the world at Epcot.  Our main destination at Epcot was Germany so that she could enjoy weinerschnitzel and a beer at the Biergarten like the ones she remembered from her life in Germany.

Maggie died in 1994.  Hospitalized from respiratory failure, but determined and feisty to the end, she passed away after removing her own respirator tube when Mom and I stepped out of her hospital room for a few minutes.

Maggie had no fear, lots of memories and always expected to win and I'll bet you a stick of Fruit Stripe that she would have loved this Florida citrus cake for her birthday.

Next Saturday: Molasses Cake

April 25: Robert E. Lee Cake

Among my many cookbooks from Bonnie Slotnick's Cookbooks in New York is Housekeeping In Old Virginia.  It was a gift from my mother.  This book is a 1965 reprint of one originally copyrighted in 1879.  The editor, Marion Cabell Tyree describes it as "containing contributions from two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives, distinguished for their skill in the culinary art and other branches of domestic economy."  Referring to herself, in the third-person, in the preface, Mrs. Tyree offers that "if she, above all, shall succeed in making American homes more attractive to American husbands, and spare them a resort to hotels and saloons for those simple luxuries which their wives know not how to provide... [she] will feel amply repaid for all the labor her work has cost."  I love this stuff.

Ad on reverse of clipping

The best parts of old cookbooks are the clues left behind that tell you about the previous owner of the book.  Inside the pages of my practically pristine copy of Housekeeping In Old Virginia, I found the clipping of the original late 60's magazine advertisement selling the cookbook as part of a cookbook-of-the-month club.  The book seems to have hardly been used.  I guess that the previous owner ordered the book from the ad, but kept the clipping in case she wanted to return the book to get a refund of her $3.95.  I don't know the magazine title or issue, but there is a strange and wonderful ad for Saran Wrap on the back side of the page.
  
Housekeeping In Old Virginia contains many gems among the recipes; tips on butchering and the storage of meat without an ice house, and how to take quinine without tasting it.  Some recipes are confounding in their apparent simplicity and this is the case with the "Robert E. Lee" Cake, submitted by "Mrs. G."  The recipe in its entirety:

Twelve eggs, their full weight in sugar, a half-weight in flour.  Bake it in pans the thickness of jelly cakes.  Take two pounds of nice "A" sugar, squeeze into it the juice of five oranges and three lemons together with the pulp; stir it in the sugar until perfectly smooth; then spread it on the cakes, as you would do jelly, putting one above the other till the whole of the sugar is used up.  Spread a layer of it on top and on sides.

A compelling recipe challenge!  After determining, from other recipes in the book, that jelly cakes are round layer cakes.  I set about deciphering the term "nice A sugar."  From what I was able to find on the internet, "A" sugar was a term for white granulated sugar.  Three ingredients in a cake with eggs as the only leavening agent, then iced with a filling that is fruit juice and sugar?  Could "A" sugar in 1897 be fine like a caster sugar?  How much pulp?


The cake was no problem.  It smelled egg-y during the baking and it rose high and even.  The filling was less successful.  Instead of stirring by hand while wearing a late Victorian corset and layers of skirts in a hot southern kitchen with no air conditioning, I used a Kitchen Aid to stir.  It took quite a while to dissolve the sugar and then I had sugary citrus juice that would never cling to a cake enough to use as a filling between the

layers much less on the sides.  I added more sugar and it turned grainy.  I gently heated the juice and lost the bright citrus flavor while not improving the texture.

So, I started over on the filling.  I tried using more pulp to add some more structure and more pectin to the mix.  I sectioned the oranges and lemons and retained the juice with the pulp.  This helped, but the texture was still only as thick as pancake syrup.  It was still a little grainy.  I set about icing the cake, juggling the runny filling as fast as I could.  Much of the juice soaked into the cake, leaving a coating of citrus pulp on the outside.  The results are interesting.  The citrus flavor interacts nicely with the egg-laden cake.  The cake is moist and light with a thin, crunchy crust.  The texture of the filling is still strange and a little grainy.  If I make a "Robert E. Lee" cake again, I will make it with orange/lemon curd filling similar to Lemon Cheese Cake (see March 7).

A recipe for "Robert E. Lee" cake, out of a cookbook from Old Virginia demanded to be made for Confederate Memorial Day, April 26.  I, like most native southerners, have Confederate veterans in my family tree.  Papa's mother, Sarah Angeline Sells Page, was an diminutive adolescent at the time of the war and she was a spy for the Confederacy.  She only stood 4'11" as a full-grown woman and during the war she was dressed as a young child and sent across enemy lines with maps and communiques secreted inside the body of her doll.  On my father's side, Granna's grandfather, Jefferson Smith, was a sharpshooter (sniper) in General Gordon's brigade.

Despite the fascinating Confederate history I have in my bloodline, our family never commemorated Confederate Memorial Day.  I don't remember special parades, commemorative services at cemeteries or even any mention of the holiday.  The way I found out that April 26 is Confederate Memorial Day is that it is also my birthday.  On my 16th birthday, my mother checked me out of school early to go to take my driving test and get my license.  We arrived at the license office in East Atlanta on Moreland Avenue to find it closed!  Georgia state offices were closed for Confederate Memorial Day back in the 1980's.

For my birthday this year, my mother will be making a gluten-free version of my favorite cake, Chocolate-Pineapple Cake.  A Chocolate-Pineapple Cake is the creation of Mama Judy's sister, Daisy Allgood Babb (called Aunt Whick, mother to Pat, Betty, Jackie).  It is a four-layered, 1-2-3-4 cake with tangy pineapple curd between the layers and dark chocolate buttercream frosting on the outside.  My mother has made this family delicacy for me for almost every birthday.  I cannot wait for tomorrow.  We'll have both a gluten-free cake and a citrus-y experiment of a cake for my birthday celebration!

My mom with my birthday cake in Jackson, Mississippi at my first house (before I removed that terrible wallpaper)

Now, if someone could give me an early birthday present and help me clean all of the sticky fruit juice and sugar out of my kitchen...

Next Saturday:  Mexican Chocolate Cake

April 4: Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling

April 2nd was the anniversary of Papa's birthday.  I wanted to bake his favorite cake this weekend, but I also felt strongly that I needed to make our family's traditional Easter cake: Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling.  I tried to remember Papa's favorite cake and couldn't.  He was always just happy with whatever Judy or Mom decided to make.  I asked my mom if she could remember his favorite cake.  She thought for a while and then said that, if asked, Papa would have named the favorite cake of whoever was asking.

Calvin Thomas Page and Buk on her first Easter

He was always and forever looking our for everyone else, especially his girls.  He had special nicknames for my mother (Dena) and me (Buk, rhymes with "boot") that the rest of the family still uses.  Papa never raised his voice, he never made a fuss.  He worked hard, always providing for his family, but also helping anyone who was down on their luck.

Papa was an electrician.  If you have ever been to a performance at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, you have experienced his work.  The Moorish-style theatre was built in 1929 and as you sit in the audience you are surrounded by trompe l'oeil parapets, awnings, and minarets set against a desert sky.  As the house lights dim before a performance, the sun "sets" across the ceiling allowing small star  to twinkle in the night sky above you as you enjoy the show.  Papa installed those stars.  It is always difficult for me to watch a show or a movie there, because I like to watch Papa's stars instead. Visit the Fabulous Fox

So, I have chosen to bake the coconut cake that was one of Mama Judy's favorites and our Easter classic.  It is a three-layer 1-2-3-4 cake with lemon curd filling and my coconut buttercream frosting.  The key to the coconut flavor in the frosting is Coco Loco coconut cream.  Coco Loco is typically used as a base for pina coladas and can be found with the cocktail mixers at the grocery store.

While other people believe their Great-Grandfather or Grandfather hung the moon, we KNOW that our Papa hung the stars.

Happy Birthday, Papa!  Happy Easter!

Next Satruday: Feud 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