Second-Stab Saturday: Anniversary cake!

We recently went to visit Our Grandparents of Cookrye. It's their wedding anniversary! So, Our Mom of Cookrye made dinner and we made dessert. And what did we make, you ask?

We made this.

Yes, we were asked to make something really special. Not just any cake recipe would do. We decided to make the silver cake. However, it occurred to us as we were getting ingredients: if this cake uses 12 egg whites to make two layers, we'll be throwing away a dozen egg yolks. We had only one response to this amount of waste:

Therefore, we decided to make one layer with egg whites and one layer with egg yolks and therefore waste no eggs. Making two cakes at once was not as tedious as one might think. Yes, we used so many dishes that they covered an entire table when laid out to dry, but we had ample time to wash them while the cakes rose.

Tada!!!

You may wonder why the cake is on foil like that. Well, this is an anniversary cake. We wanted it to come out looking spiffy and without a gutter of icing all around it. The book we got this from says to use strips of wax paper which we do not have. Therefore, foil.

It's really weird putting effort into icing.

This is an alien experience to us at A Book of Cookrye. We never decorate cakes. We hardly ever ice them at all, and if we have to bother with it, we just dump glaze on top and call it done.

Pay no attention to the really big glass of tea.

Since there was no way we were going to wait for two cakes to rise and bake one at a time, we dug out the pan exhumed from our great-grandmother's possessions. The really nice thing about it is that it has a built in slicer thing to cut the cake out with.

Why in the world did they stop making these?

However, the slicer does leave a strip-shaped dent in whatever you bake in the pan.

Incidentally, these cakes are sturdy enough to hold up like a tray of drinks.

Things were going really well for us. The cakes baked perfect, they came out of the pan in one piece, the icing tasted really good...

And I mean really good.

However, it turns out that the two cake pans are in fact not the same size. It'd have been fine if the bigger one was on the bottom and we could kind of make the thing look tiered. However, it just looked sad. I mean, who wants a cantilevered cake?

Right. Now, the book claims that if you pull the strips of paper out, they'll just slide away leaving the plate nice and neat. That is a lie. When you try to pull them out, they will not come out from under the cake at all. Instead, the whole thing will slide across the plate. Fortunately, we used a thin glaze so we weren't going to cover it with finger dents while removing the foil. But you know what? For the most part it worked! However, there were still splats of icing scattered around the plate.

However, this was easily fixed. We at A Book of Cookrye would like to salute paper towels!

This is turning out to be more bother than we were willing to put up with.

But all our foil strips and paper towels and everything paid off. Look at that lovely cake on a beautifully clean plate! We stepped back, looked at it, and thought "Why didn't we get something better than a dinner plate?" And why didn't we come up with some icing job to conceal the different-sized layers?

If someone doesn't compliment us on our perfectly clean, icing-free cake plate, there will be problems.

But it was all worth it, because everyone loved the cake! Some people preferred the lemon layer, others the almond layer. Also, this cake is so firm you can skip the plate and fork in favor of eating the slice out of your hand. The thin layer of cinnamon icing was just right for it- any more icing would have hidden the lovely, unusual flavor of the cake under a layer of gobbed-on sweetness instead of adding to it. Icing job aside, this was more effort than we usually put into cake baking, but it was so good and totally worth it.