CakeBook Monday: BAKING IN AMERICA by Greg Patent

Oh, how I love this book. Well-researched and expansive, it is packed with history and stories and is a must-have if you harbor any interest in American baking and/or American culinary history. Though sadly out-of-print, used copies can be found online for practically nothing and it was re-issued as an e-book late last year.

My own copy, above, is tagged and tabbed and torn up and stained, the cover long gone. I've read through it a few times and baked a decent number of recipes from the book. That said, two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson's Black Cake (the recipe which Ms. Dickinson sent in a letter to a friend in 1883) and Indian Meal Cake (a recipe for which appeared in the first baking book printed in America in 1828; 75 Reciepts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats by Eliza Leslie, available for free as an e-book).

Greg Patent is pretty active online, blogging as The Baking Wizard, and can be found here on Twitter

Harlequin Cake with Lemon Honey (Project VICTORIAN CAKES)

The next cake up in the project, Harlequin Cake, comes from another of eldest sister Emily's recipes. I was drawn to it for many reasons, one being the use of beets and spinach to color two of the layers, another being the use of something called Lemon Honey as a filling. The passage introducing the cake did not diminish my interest either:

A celebrated cake in our household was Harlequin Cake. We all loved it, except my father, who always shunned it himself and frequently warned us not to eat it. "No food was ever intended to be colored like that," he would say sputteringly. "If you eat it and are poisoned, you will have no one to blame but yourselves."

It's not a difficult cake, but it is time consuming. The end result, though, is rather good and quite different from most cakes today. As you can perhaps tell from the picture above, I had issues with the icing. A recipe for one used with the cake is not given in the book; Caroline mentions a white frosting, so I decided to go with basic meringue . . . which failed miserably. I can practically hear it sighing as gravity pulls it slowly down. Ha! Bemoaning aside, it's not the biggest deal, really, as the heart of the cake is the layers and the Lemon Honey. 

Speaking of, Lemon Honey is the real winner to me. It's quite a lot like lemon curd, but brighter, tarter, and somewhat transparent. A real joy for the mouth,  I highly recommend making just that if you feel so inclined!

Harlequin Cake with Lemon Honey
Adapted from Victorian Cakes by Caroline B. King

You'll need four 8" round cake pans for this. I had three on hand and bought a disposable one from the market for the fourth which was fine. Not ideal, but better than letting the batter sit.
As for the flavorings, the beet juice worked perfectly for color and the flavor was faintly there in the finished product, but not in a terrible way. The spinach, on the other hand, was a bit difficult. I found that the amount of spinach juice (just what's left over in the pot after steaming spinach, strained and cooled) needed to get a good color altered the batter in an unpleasant way. That said, I used a touch of the juice and some green coloring as well. Exact quantities in the recipe below. 

At least a few hours before you bake the cake, if not a day or two, make the Lemon Honey so that it has time to cool and thicken.  

Lemon Honey:
Zest and juice from 2 large, clean lemons
200 g (1 c) sugar
2 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
3 large egg yolks

Thoroughly blend all of the above together either using an electric mixer or with stamina and a whisk. Once everything is nicely combined, pour into a small pot. Cook the mixture over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes until thickened slightly. Remove from heat, let cool a bit, then refrigerate until cold. 

The cake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare four 8" round cake pans.
2 sticks (1 c) unsalted butter, softened
400 g (2 c) sugar
375 g (3 c) all-purpose flour
15 g (1 tbsp) baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
220 g (1 c) milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
The whites of 6 large eggs

Coloring:
1 tsp beet juice
1 tsp spinach juice plus just a drop of green food coloring
1 square unsweetened baking chocolate, melted with a tiny, tiny pinch of cinnamon. Let cool.

To make the cake:
**Weight your mixing bowl and write the number down somewhere handy.**
Sift the dry ingredients together and set aside. Measure the milk and add the vanilla extract to that. Set aside.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. On low speed, slowly mix in the dry ingredients with the milk mixture, alternating dry/wet/dry/wet/dry. Divide this batter equally into 4 different bowls (weigh your bowl now with the batter, subtract the empty bowl weight, and divide by 4).
Whip the egg whites on high speed until the mass hold stiff peaks. Again, divide by four. Gently fold 1/4 into each of the four bowls of batter along with the colorings. One bowl is left plain, one has the beet juice, one the spinach/green, and the last has the chocolate. 
Spoon and smooth out the batters into each of the four pans and slip into the oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes until the sides begin pulling away from the pan and a cake tester comes out clean. Let cool for a few minutes in pans on racks, then remove from the pans to cool completely.

To assemble:
You can stack the layers in any way you desire, spreading a big spoonful or two of the Lemon Honey between each, and a bit on the top of the cake if that takes your fancy. Optional, but feel free to frost with a billowy white icing. The recipe I used is not worth repeating here, but a classic Italian Meringue would be perfect.

CakeBook Monday: THE ART OF COOKERY by Hannah Glasse

Welcome to the very first CakeBook Monday post, a weekly highlight of books old and new that focus on cakes and baking, include wonderful recipes, or feature cakes and baking in an interesting way.

For this inaugural post, I have chosen an extremely popular book that you’ve probably never heard of, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse (available for free from Google books, though I love my Applewood 1805 facsimile).

The most sought-after cookbook in Revolutionary America, it was first published in London in 1747 and, as the title page notes, was “Printed for the Author; and fold at Mrs. Ashburn’s, a China-Shop, the corner of Fleet-Ditch.” The book made Mrs. Glasse, mother of 11 (5 of whom were surviving at the time of publication), a wealthy woman, at least for a time. Bad decisions led to declaration of bankruptcy, the sale of all rights of The Art of Cookery,  and time served in a debtors prison. She died in 1770.

Her life is the subject of a hard-to-find (at least stateside) BBC documentary, Hannah Glasse: The First Domestic Goddess. Much of what I know about her comes from the introduction to the aforementioned Applewood Books edition by the fantastic Karen Hess as well as this 2006 article from The Independent.

But what about cakes and baking? 
Truth be told, I chose this book for one line in one recipe:

Blood-warm. How odd and creepy, yet plainly intuitive? I can feel, without first-hand knowledge, what temperature that is.

So there you go. CakeBook Mondays off to a morbid start.

Bonus recipe!

Some Background (Project VICTORIAN CAKES)

THE BOOK
Victorian Cakes was published by Caxton Printers in 1941 in a single printing of 1, 530 copies. 

THE SETTING
After the Great Fire of 1871, the family moved to 1534 Diversey Avenue in the Lake View area of Chicago. The stories in Victorian Cakes take place in primarily in the 1880's in their "casual old kitchen" where Caroline recalls "beating eggs in a huge cracked turkey platter, or measuring sugar or flour in a gigantic coffee cup which, having lost its handle, is no longer fit to appear in the polite society of the breakfast table."

THE FAMILY
The parents:
Robert Campion, and Irish immigrant, Lawyer, and businessman
Mother, Canadian ex-pat referred to throughout as "Mother"

The daughters:
Kitty, 9
Caroline, "about 12"
Molly, almost 17
Maude, 18
Emily, "about 20"

The elderly family members living with the Campions:
Mother's Aunt Sophie was "gentle, fat, and rather deaf" and Uncle George, a poet who wrote one poem a day and whose portrait once hung in the 1893 World's Fair.

And "The hired help":
Anna, a "perennially young and blossomy" German woman who helped out in the kitchen and with the housework.
Emil, also German, "milked the cow, tended the garden and the chickens, drove Father into the city, kept the horses," of which they had several, and "made himself obligingly useful about the house."

THE CAKES
There are a few dozen in the book, some with standard-ish recipes (ingredients and very general directions), and some just given as anecdotes. Sprinkled throughout twelve chapters, each focusing on a particular family member, holiday, or, amusingly, "Father's Lady Friends," are recognizable cakes such as Devil's Food, White Mountain, and Apple Cake and unrecognizable ones like Dream Gingerbread, The King's Shoelaces, and the Vanity Cake I just baked.
 

Vanity Cake with Lemon Balm Icing (Project VICTORIAN CAKES)

The first recipe in Victorian Cakes is for Vanity Cake, an heirloom family recipe often baked by the oldest Campion sister, Emily. Considered rather adventurous (the chapter on Emily is entitled Our Daring Sister), she took the original recipe and made it her own by placing a delicate layer of Lemon Verbena leaves into the buttered pan, then spooning the batter over the leaves. When baked and cooled, she would carefully remove the leaves then cover the cake in "a delicate icing faintly flavored with lemon."

As fresh Lemon Verbena is difficult to find (and expensive) this time of year, I chose to use Lemon Balm, a cousin of Verbena, for flavoring. I discovered that whole, fresh leaves of Lemon Balm are also a tad difficult to find in January, so a box of good Lemon Balm tea it was. More on the use of that below.

Though modern ingredients and measurements are given (the memoir was first published in 1941), oven temperatures, baking times, pan sizes, and other such helpful tidbits are noticeably absent. So, I guessed (though it was educated)!

For this cake, I used this Nordic Ware Coffee Cake Pan which produces a nice shape and is not as large as other tube pans, though I would think that any standard tube or bundt pan would work. I could see two 8" cake pans working as well.

Essentially a Genoise, the recipe can adapt to just about any flavoring (even perfume, though with unfortunate results! More on that in a few weeks!), and I imagine (as is mentioned in the book) that almond, lemon, and vanilla would all be lovely. If you choose to go that route, I would add a tsp of vanilla, 1/2 tsp of almond, or the half the juice from one lemon to the milk before mixing. 

As prepared by me, it was . . . fine. Not too bad, really. I suffered from egg-white-fear and did not fold them in as thoroughly as I should have. And it lacked any flavor other than the faint brush of Lemon Balm on the tongue. Next time, I would consider adding a touch of lemon or vanilla to the batter. Or Orange Flower Water! Yes, that would be excellent!

Check back on Monday for a proper introduction to Caroline, her family, and the book that has entranced me so. Until then . . . 

Vanity Cake with Lemon Balm Icing
Adapted from Victorian Cakes by Caroline B. King

113 g (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
300 g (1 ½ c) sugar
188 g (1 ½ c) all-purpose flour
64 g (½ c) cornstarch
9 g (1 ½ tsp) baking powder
½ tsp kosher salt
120 g (½ c) milk
6 whites from large eggs, at room temperature

Preheat the oven to 350 d. Liberally butter your chosen pan(s).

Sift together the all-purpose flour, cornstarch, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

Cream the softened butter with the sugar until fluffy. On low speed, or by hand, mix in the dry ingredients in three parts alternated with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry. Set aside.

Whip the 6 egg whites to a stiff peak. Gently fold into the cake batter, mixing thoroughly but with a light hand.

Spoon batter into the pan, smoothing the top.

Bake 30-35 min until the top is lightly browned, edges are pulling away from the pan, and a tester comes out clean.

Let cool in pan 10 min, then remove to a rack to cool completely.

Lemon Balm Icing:

Brew a strong, small cup of hot Lemon Balm tea. Let cool. Whisk the cooled tea into confectioners sugar until desired consistency is reached.

Liberally smooth the icing over the cake.