"Yes B'y, Mudder Cake" With Home-Made Caramel Frosting

I'm very much home. The words running through my head have turned to Newfanese.

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...

The 1948 Joy of Cooking and My 12-Egg Yolk Yellow Cake with Orange Custard Filling and Lemon Buttercream

This one takes the cake, so to speak...

 

For my friend's birthday I made her an angel food cake. It took 12 egg whites. I was not about to throw out 12 egg yolks and there's no way I could eat enough mayonnaise, zabaglione, or bechamel to get through these things in the short amount of time they can be kept in the fridge. So they got frozen.*

Then the perfect occasion came. Serendipitous, really. I had to make cakes for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Craft and Cake Sale. So 6 yolks for the 3-yolk cakes, and 6 yolks for the orange custard.

From where did I get such a recipe in a land of low-fat everything? The 1948 Joy of Cooking.

Just thinking about this book makes me a little giddy. It's in my house, on my bookshelf, and I cook from it whenever I want. It's a relic, like a piece of history living in my house. It's torn up, taped up and beautiful. The wonderful Irma Rombauer...her personality gets steam-rolled in the later editions, but early on she was present in every chapter, in every recipe, with fast quips, helpful suggestions, and dated commentaries. For example, the first chapter is "cocktails", and starts like this:

"The chief virtue of cocktails is their informal quality. They loosen the tongues and unbutton the reserves of the socially diffident. Serve them by all means, preferably in the living room, and the sooner the better."

She follows this up respectably with:

"To give this book the impression of sobriety and stability it deserves, the alcoholic cocktails have been relegated to the chapter on Beverages. There they may blush unseen by those who disapprove of them and they may be readily found in the company of many other good drinks by those who do not."

Incredibly well-said. Her nonalcoholic cocktails range from juices to oysters to pineapple boats. Very American. Other chapters start with wonderful introductions such as the chapter on fish which first describes the skinning and filleting process, but then dives into a Chinese proverb, and then the following:

"First, we must determine which is the best way to cook our fish."

Our fish, Irma. We're in this together.

Then there's the section on sweetbreads. I'm not sure if the modern version of the book includes the recipe for larded sweetbreads with wine sauce. Too bad. Or baked brains, tomatoes, and eggs. Breakfast of champions. Irma was definitely a champion.

Some of the best moments are her sections of "general rules", including "general rules for making pie crust" and her dictionary of baking that describes the differences between creaming, blending, cutting in, and kneading. Then there's the following description for the Queen Mary's Sponge Cake:

"When King George was sick, his wife, who is reported to have that inborn thing, 'a light hand with pastry,' bought a book of Marie Corelli's and baked a sponge cake for him....This recipe makes a large, delicate, fine-grained cake, which, if somewhat uninteresting, makes up for that by being highly digestible."

I didn't immediately think a light hand with pastry was what she meant by "that inborn thing", being royalty and all...

For the egg-yolk cake I initially planned on making the "Gold Cake", and the following description was provided:

"This recipe calls for 8 egg yolks. The cake is light and palatable."

Encouraging, Ms. Rombauer.

Light? Maybe not. And "palatable" is not usually how I think of cake. I love her honesty, though. It really seemed as though she didn't want anyone to make this cake. So I didn't. I made the 3-yolk sponge instead and doubled the recipe.

Ms. Rombauer has a lot of rules, so to make this cake I had to go back and read the opening of the sponge cake section. She says not to disturb the balance of the recipes by careless measuring. Sift flour three times. In her day, people sifted over paper. Does anyone still sift over paper? She gives the ratio of bread flour to cake flour if substitutions must be made. Then there are the separate rules for mixing with an electric mixer. Typically her mixing is done with a whisk. Fore-arms of steel, she had.

Ingredients:
Egg yolks
Sugar
Salt
boiling water
cake flour (exchanged for bread flour with Ms. Rombauer's proper ratio)
baking powder
vanilla
grated orange rind

Simple, right? I was not going to mess this one up. I even sifted the sugar and salt twice as suggested before blending it in to the beaten, light egg yolks. Then in went the water, the thrice-sifted flour (maybe I only did it twice...maybe, because then she threw a fast one by saying to sift again with the baking powder), and beat only as much as I needed to combine it all before adding the vanilla and orange rind. I baked it in an 8" baking dish and a piece of aluminum I'd shaped around my one 8" baking dish (...) and baked in my 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Perfect. Of course it was perfect. It's Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.

To come: Orange custard (aka what I did with the other 6 egg yolks) and lemon buttercream (because I ran out of orange juice...)

*You just mix 1 1/2 tsp of sugar with every four yolks (if you're going to use them for sweet dishes) or an 1/8th teaspoon of salt for every four (for savoury dishes). The yolk doesn't really freeze solid, so it was overkill of me to freeze them in ice cube trays to make sure they could be easily separated later. I didn't plan to use them all at once...well, oops.