Marble Cake: or, Food coloring was the only good thing in the recipe

Today is a day for artificial dye and attempted self indulgence.

The cakes featured on this blog have mostly been dye-free, but that's only because I have been restrained. (Well, not always.) Many of my childhood birthday cakes were blue, green, turquoise, or some other color that could not have been achieved with natural ingredients. (I only got to dye the dessert on my birthday.) One year I got a bit classier than usual and made a lavender-colored cake with strawberry jam in the middle and cream cheese icing on the outside. Another year the cake was a Irish-festival green with tan-colored caramel icing on top. (That was one of the few times that I actually attempted any sort of cohesive color palette.)

This brings us to today's recipe. It comes from the side of an old flour canister my mother got at an antique store and put in the kitchen among the knickknacks. I was sold as soon as I read "divide in as many parts as wished, and add different colors."

I was curious what happened to the Kimbell Flour company. I found very little about the company itself. Apparently Kimbell Flour has some sort of tax precedent named after it (and no, I couldn't understand a word of that article). Also, all of that flour money led to one of the most prestigious art museums in the region. 

Apparently the Kimbells left a lot of funds for their namesake museum. For one thing, the permanent collection is free. I don't mean that it's free on Sundays or once a month (as is often the case). The Kimbell Art Museum is free every single day (unless you want to see the traveling exhibits). Furthermore, the museum has free covered parking, which is a mercy when your car would otherwise get roasted in the brutal Texas sun. I am absolutely delighted that one of the most famous art museums in the region was funded by carbohydrates.

As is often the case with museums, the building itself is beautiful. They hired a famous architect who designed some light, airy spaces for the art to hang.

Wikimedia

Honestly, I think they got really lucky with this architect. I don't mean they were lucky to get him, I mean they were lucky the place came out this good. If you go to his Wikipedia page, some of his designs are beautiful. Others are somewhere between "1970s college building" and "Soviet Union."

You need a degree to understand why this isn't depressing- especially when you're climbing those stairs in the summer. Wikimedia

Given that part of the money from this flour box ultimately went towards an art museum, I think it's very fitting to make a cake that involves a lot of colors. 

Things started looking bad as soon as I mixed everything. Our batter was a little stiffer than I expected. Usually, if you're supposed to fold egg whites into a cake, the batter tends to be thin enough to coax them in without deflating the little bubbles.

All right, at this point we're supposed to add eight egg whites. That's, like, almost an angel food cake's worth of egg whites. Because I didn't want to throw out eight egg yolks (or find some way to force them into a future recipe), I bought a carton of pre-separated whites instead of cracking the eggs myself. They were still a bit floppy after a long beating, so I added some cream of tartar let the mixer keep going while I wiped the countertop.

Now, I have often advised that you can purchase egg whites by the carton if you don't want to crack all those eggs for yourself. I've also written that as long as you shake the carton right before you pour them out, your egg whites will whip up just fine-- which is the standard advice. (If you don't shake the carton, all the proteins settle to the bottom, leaving mostly water at the top.) But no matter how long I let the mixer go, these egg whites refused to get past slightly frothed. And furthermore, no matter how gently I folded or how delicate I was with a rubber spatula, the egg whites deflated back to a watery mess on contact with the batter. If anything, I appear to actually have less batter than before I tried to fluff it up.

At this point, I could tell that this recipe was going nowhere. You can't save yourself from faulty ingredients. And I was furious at how all those nonrefundable ingredients refused to act as they should. I was trying to figure out how to salvage this. Should I thin the batter with milk and try with egg whites again? Bake it as-is and hope for the best?

While my mind was busy thinking of how to salvage this and the oven was just reaching its temperature, my hands were grabbing the bowl and flinging its contents into the garbage. I almost didn't realize I'd done it until I looked down and saw the stray splatters around the trash can.

But since I had already prepared the pans and heated the oven, I decided to try again. Yes, we had just wasted a cake's worth of ingredients, but sometimes things go wrong. And why should I let one failure get in the way of a cake?

Obviously, I didn't have the foresight to leave two Kimbell cakes' worth of butter out all day to soften. But did you know that if you have no patience, you can just put the butter in a cheese shredder? It's soft by the time it lands in the bowl.

So this time, I cracked open a lot of eggs. I know this meant I had to figure out how to not waste half a dozen yolks, but I figured we could have cake now and economize later.

Reassuringly, our batter expanded nicely when we got the egg whites into it. It was nice to know that the earlier problem was with faulty ingredients and not with me.

I really wanted to do different color schemes for each cake layer, but we didn't have enough batter for that. So two colors (plus an equal amount of undyed cake, as specified in the directions) would have to do.

Actually, hang on a minute. We're supposed to add the food coloring AFTER getting the egg whites in? When you have a cake that is raised by egg whites, you generally leave the batter alone after (gently!) mixing in the bubbles. I tried to tell myself the cake would be fine as long as we followed the directions. That was incorrect, but at least the batter has a backup spoonful of baking powder.

I did like the way the batter looked after we got it into the pan. It was almost fit for an art museum. Two Tondi of Cookrye, anyone?

Before committing to ice this thing, I carefully broke out a piece and tried it. I wouldn't have minded a thin cake, but this just wasn't worth getting out the mixer. And the texture was... bad. And... I didn't expect a recipe on a flour box to be this bad. Usually these are professionally tested.

It was rubbery and almost bouncy. It should have been a LOT taller for all the egg whites we beat into it and the excessive baking powder. I tried some of the undyed sections to see if the texture was any better if you didn't deflate the batter with food coloring. It wasn't. If this is the best cake recipe the Kimbell Flour Company could come up with, I'm not surprised they went under.

I threw the whole cake out. Even setting aside my frustration at making this, it was bland and all-around underwhelming. I've have better cakes at office birthday parties where everyone gets an annual budget cut instead of a raise. As I said on an earlier post, I've realized that it's better to throw out kitchen failures than to force myself to eat them. Yes, wasting food is bad, but sometimes it happens when you're trying new recipes. It is better to accept the casualty and get it out of the kitchen.

Eating a crappy cake to keep it out of the trash won't improve anyone's life, including your own. Growing up, we were guilted about "those starving children in [some country]," but no one in any part of the world is going to have a better day just because some far-off American ate a bad cake instead of throwing it out. With all that said, this cake would have been easier to throw away when eggs were cheap.