All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [63]
Whip cream until it holds its shape. Add eggs and whip until light as foam. Add sugar and beat again. Add vanilla. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together 3 times and add to egg mixture. Bake in greased layer cake pans in a moderate oven (350 degrees F) 25 to 30 minutes. Makes two 8-inch layers. Cool and spread Seven-Minute Icing or whipped cream between the layers and on top.
Seven-Minute Icing
This is slightly different from the Seven-Minute Frosting on page 80.
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YOU’LL NEED
1 unbeaten egg white
⅞ cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons cold water
½ teaspoon flavor extract
Place all the ingredients in the top of a double boiler. Place over boiling water and beat with beater for 7 minutes. Add flavorings, beat, and spread on the cake.
FLAVORING OPTIONS
1. Chocolate: Add to above one and ½ ounces melted, unsweetened chocolate two minutes before taking from fire.
Melissa’s Note: Yeah, it took me a minute or two to figure the chocolate directions, too. Here’s the translation: Add 1½ounces of melted unsweetened chocolate 5 minutes into beating the icing. Beat for 2 more minutes.
2. Coffee: Use cold boiled coffee in place of water.
Melissa’s Note: Coffee? That means one thing—PEDICURE TIME! Let’s all run to Starbucks then go to the nail place next door! I’ll take the Glamour magazine and you take Cosmopolitan! Maybe between the two of us, we’ll finally find out “What Women REALLY want!”
3. Vanilla: Now, Debra Bruno’s grandmother used ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract for flavoring, so there’s another option for you.
Let’s get back to The American Woman’s Cook Book (see page 157). I first learned about it from the food section of the Washington Post in an article by Debra Bruno, “The Cake Through Which I Came to Know My Grandmother.” She wrote about her grandmother’s copy of The American Woman’s Cook Book, especially about the notations throughout: “There is a detailed record of her cooking triumphs: 18 markings of ‘excellent’, 19 with ‘swell’, 4 ‘delicious’, 1 ‘good’ and 1 ‘very, very good’ painstakingly written along with month, day, and year from 1946 to 1979.”
Debra went on to say that she was able to glimpse fragments of her family history, including the Whipped Cream Cake made on March 10, 1946, her mother’s fifteenth birthday.
The cake became a Cake Project recipe of the week. I made it, and it was “excellent, swell” and then some. Light and fluffy—the perfect white frosted cake!
Jimmy managed to track down a used copy of the cookbook for me—it’s the size of a medium hardcover dictionary, with a green, well-worn, stained cover and this mysterious inscription on the front plate:
Eve—
You can live without poetry, music and art,
You can live without movies, with a broken
heart, You can live without friends and live without books,
But civilized man cannot live without
cooks!
—The Coppers. Christmas, 1943.
I swear, I don’t know Eve from Adam, but I want that on my headstone.
Again, this is the same cake as Aunt Di’s Bittersweet-Chocolate Frosted Layer Cake (page 157). But Aunt Di’s is a doubled recipe of this cake. And this one has a different frosting. If you’re feeling unsure, turn to the directions for Aunt Di’s cake. At left are the original instructions for the cake as they appear in the book. Be forewarned: it’s a small cake, and serves 12 to 16 people.
Honey Buttercream and Apricot Jam Cake
Another Option for the Whipped Cream Cake
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YOU’LL NEED
Two 8-inch or 9-inch round cake pans
A whisk attachment and extra bowl for mixer
A double boiler, real or improvised
A hand-held mixer
Double recipe Whipped Cream Cake (page 162) without frosting (see Tip)
1 cup sugar
4 large egg whites
3 sticks (1½ cups) unsalted butter, cut into pats, at room temperature
¼ cup fresh lemon juice (from 2 large lemons)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ teaspoons honey
⅔ cup good-quality apricot jam, slightly warmed or stirred until spreadable
Tip: This is the same as the recipe of Aunt Di’s Bittersweet-Chocolate Frosted Layer Cake, page 157, again without the