• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

6. When completely cool, turn the cakes out the pans onto a rack, and spread the layers with White Mountain Frosting.

Makes 1 spectacular birthday cake, enough for 10

WHITE MOUNTAIN FROSTING

This was the traditional frosting in my mother’s family and if the baker was in a generous mood, she (always a she) made a double recipe of the icing for the birthday honoree and presented it both on the cake and in a bowl with a spoon. I don’t usually like ice cream with cake, but vanilla ice cream is sensational with this frosting. If you let the frosted cake sit for a couple of hours, the frosting sometimes develops a crust like that of a very crispy-creamy meringue. A forkful of cake with some crunchy-sweet frosting and ice cream will make your birthday very happy indeed.

This isn’t how my grandmother makes her White Mountain frosting, but I find this method much easier. You need a candy thermometer for this.

1½ cups sugar

3 large egg whites

¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

Pinch of salt

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. In a small saucepan, bring the sugar and ½ cup water to a boil. Put a candy thermometer in the pot.

2. Meanwhile, with an electric mixer, start beating the egg whites with the cream of tartar and salt until foamy. Turn off the mixer.

3. When the temperature of the syrup reaches 240 degrees F, turn on the mixer once again and, beating ferociously, add the syrup in a slow drizzle. Keep beating as you add the vanilla, and continue for a few minutes until the frosting is glossy and barely warm.

Makes 7 cups, enough for one 2-layer birthday cake

SIMPLEST BUTTERCREAM

I love White Mountain Frosting, but my husband thinks it’s too sugary. He prefers buttercream. I like that, too. There is only one frosting I don’t like: canned frosting. The ingredient list (trans fats, preservatives, artificial flavors) is almost as nauseating as the synthetic flavors.

Make it or buy it? Make it.

Hassle: Hardly any if you soften your butter and own a mixer

Cost comparison: Betty Crocker canned frosting: $0.12 per tablespoon. Homemade buttercream: $0.06.

¾ pound (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

9 cups confectioners’ sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Scant ⅔ cup milk

In a large bowl, beat the butter very hard until fluffy. Add four cups of the sugar, then the vanilla and milk. Add the rest of the sugar and beat well.

Makes 6 cups

AFTERWORD

It’s empowering to know I can cure bacon, brew vanilla, age Camembert, extract honeyfrom a hive, and behead a chicken, even if I have no desire to do at least one of those things ever again. Even if, in the end, I spent more money than I saved. (A few costly projects like the chickens and the bees ate up all the savings of from scratch cooking). Big food companies flatter us by telling us how busy we are and they simultaneously convince us that we are helpless. I am moderately busy, but not all that helpless. Neither are you. Everything I did in the course of my scratch-cooking era—with the possible exceptions of eviscerating poultry and stuffing hot dogs—was very, very easy.

But the more helpless we feel, the lower those food companies move the bar of our expectations, and the bar is now very low at your local supermarket. Trust me. I have eaten my way through mine. It makes me quite furious when I think about the sicketating powdered hollandaise sauce, the extortionate price of the vanilla extracts, the pathetic bread, the soups sweetened with corn syrup, the abomination of Pillsbury “creamy vanilla” canned frosting that contains neither cream nor vanilla. It upsets me that we pay as much for these foods as we do.

Almost everything is better when it’s homemade. While this may have started out as opinion (though I’m not sure it did), I would now state it confidently as fact. Almost everything. But not everything. Which makes me inordinately happy. Because I think it’s reassuring that you can walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of potato chips and a tub of rice pudding