I'll be honest, I made this cake in Montreal about a week before leaving, but I can't write about it now like a Montrealer. I'm half a country away and so I'm going to write about it in the words that are running through my head. I don't remember why I thought the words "Yes b'y, mudder," yesterday, but it seems that my mom did something shockin, and as my vowels got smaller in the front and rounder in the back and my skin got sticky from the island's damp air, those are the words I thought.
I made the cake on a whim one night after a decent dinner of leftovers and a disappointing red wine. A bit depressed at the thought of starting my evening in front of my computer, I procrastinated by making cake. If Irma Rombauer had been a Newfoundlander...well, much of her cookbook would be the same, except she'd be a little less self-confident, there would be a lot more recipes for salt fish and beef, more whipped cream pudding cakes with tinned pineapple (there are already a lot, including pineapple snow - a moulded cake with heavy cream, not whipped cream, thank god), and a whole lot fewer recipes for un-Newfoundlander-esque things like oysters, persimmons, peaches (except the tinned kind), and such foreign sounding things as tamale pie and antipasto. Honest to god I laughed a right sad laugh when I saw the persimmons at the grocery store here yesterday. they were hardly orange, more old and brown and sick-looking. If they were a dog, I would have put it down. Who would buy those poor persimmons, I haven't the foggiest.
All I have to say, though, is Jesus, Irma, your caramel sauce is some good.
Narn bit of corn syrup involved. And the cake was about the best cake I'd eaten in ages. I couldn't stop. There were no spices in it, and besides using a gluten-free flour blend instead of all-purpose, using half sugar and half agave nectar (which I thought would dry it out but it didn't) I didn't change a darn thing in the recipe.
All her sifting! I sifted until I was all sifted out: 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup agave nectar
Cream: 2 tbsp butter (that's it! Just 2. You could almost eat the whole cake it's so light...until you get to the next 2 ingredients) then add the sugar/agave mixture and mix for ages (about 2 minutes. You can't even drink caffeine in Newfoundland that quickly. The city doesn't believe in espresso). Beat in 1 egg yolk (at room temperature, of course).
Sift!!! Tree times (not a typo) 3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp bread flour (my gluten-free blend) or 2 cups cake flour. Don't add it to the egg mixture.
Sift!!! Just once more with1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt. That's a ton of salt. Not to a Newfoundlander who may have grown up on saltfish and saltbeef and saltpork, and Jesus, anything else you can salt, but in this cake it's a lot of salt. A delicious, perfect lot of salt. Do it.
Measure out 1/2 plus 2 tbsp milk. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beat, then add 1/3 of the milk, beat, then half the remaining flour, beat, then half the milk, beat, then the remaining flour, beat, then the last of the milk. Only beat a fe seconds after each addition, says Irma. I agree, of course.
Then beat in 1/2 tsp almond extract or amaretto. The amaretto is my idea because a lot of people don't have almond extract (It's not as if there's tons of amaretto kicking around the average kitchen either, though, especially in Newfoundland, but there is a LOT of rum, and that's fine too. At the liquor store yesterday there were more rums than Canadian wines. A Newfoundlander wouldn't know a Canadian wine if it came out and sang the National Anthem. I had to laugh when I saw a shelf called "Local Wine" and there was Newfoundland blueberry wine sitting next to Pinnacle iced wine. "Local"...).
Now the fun part. I was NOT about to wash my beaters to whip up one little egg white. You've got to make sure you dry the beaters really well, because water and inhibit the riding of the white. So I decided to whisk it. People had been doing it forever, surely I could too. So I started and it was slow going. I switched hands and ways of holding the whisk about 10 times in the 5 or so minutes it actually took me to whisk the white. That's ridiculous. I tried to go quickly but I apparently am as bad at whisking as at kneading, but I can't blame my cold hands on this one.
I decided that the directions to whip until "stiff but not dry" were going to have to deal with me being exhausted of whipping. So I quit and hoped it was enough. It stayed in place when I removed the whisk, so that was a good sign, I figured. the nice thing about not using a handheld beater was the air stayed in the white better. It didn't collapse. My energy had made it stronger than electricity, I told myself. Maybe Irma's hubris is rubbing off on me? Nope, I'm still a right useless whisker.
Fold the white gently into the rest of the batter. This is where hand-whisking is great because I wasn't so worried about wrecking my cake through collapsing egg whites.
I greased the 8" cake pan liked I'd never greased before (I had to use aluminum because the bottom of my cake pan is trashed). I think I used a good 1 1/2 tbsp of butter because the rest of the cake had so little. Poured in the batter. 350 Fahrenheit for 25 minutes. Done. Beautiful. Some good, wha?
Caramel while that was going on...
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