A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [205]
10. Let the cake stand at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours before serving. To cut the cake, use your sharpest serrated knife and a gentle seesaw motion.
LADY BALTIMORE CAKE
MAKES A 9-INCH, 3-LAYER CAKE
While researching my American Century Cookbook (1997), I was surprised to discover how many versions there were of this beloved southern cake. Some were white cakes, and some were yellow like the original, a variation of the popular “lady” cake of the day, said to have been created by Alicia Rhett Mayberry of Charleston. While visiting the South Carolina town he called America’s “most lovely…most wistful” in the early 1900s, novelist Owen Wister discovered the cake at the Women’s Exchange Tea Room there. Lady Baltimore, he called the cake, the tea room, and his best-selling set-in-Charleston novel published in 1906. Was his Lady Baltimore heroine based upon Charleston belle Alicia Rhett Mayberry? Some say so. There is no denying, however, that Wister’s rhapsodizing about Lady Baltimore cake sent readers scurrying for the recipe. He writes of it as early as Chapter 1: “I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore…Oh, my goodness!…It’s all soft, and it’s in layers, and it has nuts—but I can’t write any more about it; my mouth waters too much!” The recipe here is updated and adapted from Alicia Rhett Mayberry’s, which appears in Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking (1930), a recipe anthology assembled by Blanche S. Rhett and edited by Lettie Gay. Note: Refrigerate any leftover cake.
Cake
3½ cups sifted cake flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
8 large egg yolks
1¼ cups milk
1 teaspoon almond extract
4 large egg whites, beaten to soft peaks
Frosting
3 cups sugar
½ cup fresh lemon juice
¼ cup boiling water
4 large egg whites, beaten to stiff peaks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
2 cups coarsely chopped seedless raisins
1. For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350° F. Grease and flour three 9-inch layer cake pans well, tap out the excess flour, and set aside.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt onto a piece of wax paper and set aside also.
3. Cream the butter in a large electric mixer bowl, first at low speed and then at high for 2 to 3 minutes or until light and fluffy. With the machine at moderately low speed, add the sugar gradually and continue beating for 1 to 2 minutes or until light. Add the egg yolks two at a time, beating well after each addition.
4. With the mixer at low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients in three batches, alternating with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry, and beating after each addition only enough to combine. Stir in the almond extract.
5. Mix about 1 cup of the beaten egg whites into the cake batter to lighten it, then gently fold in the rest until no streaks of white remain. Divide the batter among the three pans and rap each sharply on the counter once or twice to expel large air bubbles.
6. Bake in the lower third of the oven for 25 to 30 minutes or until the cakes are springy to the touch and a cake tester inserted midway be-tween the center and the rim comes out clean.
7. Cool the cakes in the upright pans on wire racks for 5 minutes, then turn out on the racks and cool to room temperature.
8. Meanwhile, prepare the frosting: Combine the sugar, lemon juice, and water in a heavy 4-quart saucepan; insert a candy thermometer. Set over moderately high heat, stir until the sugar dissolves, then cook without stirring until the syrup spins a long thread (234° to 236° F.). Beating with an electric mixer at high speed, add the boiling syrup to the stiffly beaten egg whites in a thin stream, then continue beating until the frosting is stiff enough to hold its shape. Stir in the vanilla, then fold in