Graham Cracker Cake: or, Every one of these is delicious in its own unique way

No matter where I travel, I always end up in the kitchen.

Graham Cracker Cream Cake 1½ cups graham cracker crumbs 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp. salt 5 eggs, separated 1 cup sugar 1 cup chopped nuts, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Cream filling (made from the custard recipe or pudding mix of your choice) Icing or whipped cream for the top Heat oven to 350°. Cut parchment paper circles to fit the bottoms of two 8-inch round cake pans. Coat the pans with cooking spray and firmly press the paper into place. Then spritz the top of the paper with cooking spray. Even if you don't usually line your pans, you really want to with this cake. It did its damnedest to stick to the paper when I made it. Because I was prepared, the cake fell out of the pan and took the paper with it. You can easily peel stuck-on paper off of a cake. But if the cake sticks to the pan, it's all over. Mix the crumbs, baking powder, and salt; set aside. In a very large bowl, beat the egg yolks until thick and pale. Add the sugar and beat until very pale and about the consistency of cake batter. Then change out the beaters in your mixer (if it came with a second set), or run the mixer in a cup of soapy water to thoroughly clean them. With a spoon or rubber spatula, stir in the crumbs, nuts, and vanilla. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Then fold them in, about a third at a time. The mixture may seem too stiff for this to work, but it will be fine. Pour into the pans and bake for about 30 minutes (they may take longer), or until the cake pulls away from the sides of the pans and spring back when lightly pressed in the center. Put layers together with cream filling. When making the filling, reduce the milk (or whatever liquid the recipe or mix uses) to about three-fourths the original amount so it is thick enough to stay in the cake and not get squeezed out when you stack the layers and then cut it. You can either ice the cake, or leave it bare and serve with whipped cream on top. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

After discovering graham cracker cakes from one of my great-grandmother's paper scraps, I don't know why they ever went out of style. They taste just like the crumb crusts underneath countless cheesecakes and pies, and a lot of people like those more than the cheesecake itself. 

Anyway, today we are making our first graham cake that's not from my great-grandmother's notes but from an outside source.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

This comes from Mrs. Mary Martensen's cookbook. I've come to like this book a lot. After reading the scanned PDF on a screen wasn't good enough, I hijacked a friend's printer and bound it Coptic-style. (The board for the covers was lovingly swiped from an artist's scrap heap.)

If you don't want your book trimmed, anyone can do Coptic binding without buying specialized supplies. Really, you just need some sturdy string, an extra-large needle, a way to punch holes in the pages (I used a power drill), and a few clamps. I think most people already have everything except the extra-large sewing needle and possibly the clamps. Still, those are things you can get from most craft and hardware stores. You don't need to go to any specialized bookmaking shops. (It definitely helps to wax your string, but I simply pulled mine through a dollar store tealight candle.)

But if you want your book to have neat edges, you probably can't do that with things lying around your house. I had to take Mrs. Mary Martensen to a local binding shop. They were like "I don't even know how to charge you for this, so have a good day!"

So my honest advice is that you can make Coptic books at home in a leisurely afternoon. You don't have to glue them together and let them sit in clamps overnight. Nor do you need to spend a lot of money on book-specific tools unless you want the edges to be nice and even, in which case it's awfully nice to have a hydraulic cutter in the house.

Didn't Mrs. Mary Martensen come out cute!

 

All of this bookbinding chat is to say that my friend's kitchen has open shelves instead of cabinets. While I don't like exposing the dishes to airborne grease and other ickiness, it was nice to prop up the book at eye level.

Getting down to cake, this particular recipe starts off with a modern-day luxury: nearly half a dozen eggs.

Speaking of eggs, I looked up Mrs. Mary Martensen to see what other publications are still floating around. I didn't want to order any, but I did look through sample pages of various booklets just to see if any recipes were carried over from one book to the next. This cake made the cut at least twice, though they seem to have taken out half the eggs as the Depression wore on. (Also, I've got those cupcakes saved for a future dessert occasion.)

What Shall We Have For Dinner? Twenty Menus by Mary Martensen, ca. 1930s (via Ebay)

I didn't buy this book, but it made me like Mary Martensen even more than I already did. For one thing, the meal planning page tells us to serve dessert "once a day, sometimes twice." Also, among the household hints on the back cover, Mrs. Mary Martensen says that "Tests also prove that searing does not hold in more juices." 

Mrs. Mary Martensen was simultaneously of her time and ahead of it.

It's true that cooking advice from ninety years ago often gets debunked in the ensuing decades (unless they're telling you to serve dessert once a day, sometimes twice). But modern tests show that searing doesn't "seal in" anything. Also, given that steaks are generally considered man-territory for manly-men, I don't appreciate how many websites called it an "old wives tale." 

Towards the bottom of the list, under "Other Foods:" Dessert once a day, sometimes twice.

Setting aside our gender symposium and getting back to the mixing bowl, you can tell this recipe came out after handcranked eggbeaters got cheap. I can't imagine anyone putting a few linear miles on a whisk for the sake of pulverized graham crackers.

We only needed a minute with an electric mixer to get here, but a hand-whisk could easily have stretched this into multiple hours.

After our egg yolks and sugar were beaten until they looked like batter, we needed to move them to a bigger bowl. If you try this at home, you can start this recipe in a really big bowl and lower the dirty-dish count, but this one was made of cheap plastic that couldn't withstand an electric beating. The mixer gouged several pits out of the plastic when making a cheesecake and filled the batter with blue speckles.

Adding the graham crackers turned this into a really hard paste. I didn't see how we would ever fold in the egg whites without mashing the air right back out of them. But I figured that we still had some baking powder in the batter in case the whites failed.

I coaxed the whites into the batter in a few increments. To my surprise, the batter actually fluffed up.

I know that most cakes pull away from the sides of the pan when they're ready to leave the oven, but these shrank a lot. They also formed little filaments of hardened batter as they contracted. These would later unnerve the person I was visiting, who said "I feel weird eating a cake with strings coming off it."

Next, it was time to put the cream filling onto our masterpiece. I had planned to simply put icing in the middle, but the recipe says to "put layers together with cream filling." I didn't give that any thought until my friend looked at the recipe and asked "Why is it a graham cracker cream cake? There's no cream in it. It's just eggs?" So, I made a custard for the middle.

Also, I love how the cake fit snugly in the paper plate. It's like the two were made for each other.

If the filling is an odd color, it's because I couldn't resist adding something that practically suggested itself as it sat among the spices After all, one of the nice things about cooking in other people's houses is you can use things you don't have at home.

To further put the cream in cream cake, I put whipped cream on top of it. This conveniently meant I didn't have to attempt a decent-looking icing job.

Like the chiffon cake, it was almost impressively resilient, which was great until you tried to get a knife into it.

I thought this cake tasted wonderfully and deliciously like a graham cracker pie crust. My friend, on the other hand, pondered his slice (while rapidly inhaling forkloads of it) and said "This tastes like banana bread."

"I guess it does, but there's no bananas in it."

"I know, but it has the same spices as banana bread."

"The only spice in this is vanilla." (Only the filling contained root beer.)

"Then what is this?"

I thought this had the best flavor of all the graham cracker cakes we've seen on this blog (though our first one had the best texture). My friend took a fairly large hunk of it to work (but not too much-- apparently it was too good to send out of the house). I was informed that "everyone loved it."