Happy 9th anniversary to A Book of Cookrye!

Today marks nine years of delights, disappointments, and the occasional edible horror!  That's a trio of trios of years! To commemorate this big day, we're treating ourselves to the most surprising recipe we've ever found:

Graham-Coconut Layer Cake 1⅓ cup sugar 10 tbsp butter 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 4 eggs 1⅓ cup milk 11 oz (3 cups) graham cracker crumbs 5 oz (1 firmly packed cup) shredded coconut Heat oven to 350°. Grease two 9" round cake pans. Cut two circles of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pans, and press them firmly into place. Then grease the top of the paper. Cream together the butter, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Mix in the eggs one at a time, beating each one in well before adding the next. Alternately add the graham crumbs (in three additions) and the milk (in two additions), starting and ending with crumbs. Then stir in the coconut. Pour into the prepared pans. Bake until the center springs back when lightly pressed, about 20-30 minutes. After they are completely cooled, remove from pans. (You may need to cut the sides loose). Put lemon filling between the cake layers and white icing on top. After spreading the lemon filling on the bottom cake layer, let it sit a few minutes to firm up before putting the top cake layer on it. Note: If you want a firmer cake that slices more neatly, separate the eggs before beginning. Add in the yolks where you would have beaten in the whole eggs. Beat each yolk in thoroughly before adding then next. After you have added everything else to the batter, beat the egg whites until they're almost but not quite stiff. Then fold them into the batter.         Lemon Filling: 6 tbsp sugar ¼ cup sour cream 2 tbsp lemon juice 2 tbsp butter In a small saucepan, stir together the sugar and sour cream. Beat well to eliminate lumps. Add the remaining ingredients. If using a fresh lemon instead of bottled lemon juice, grate the rind and add it also. Place over medium-high heat and cook, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pot well, until it boils for 3 minutes. Let stand until it cools and thickens. (You can cool it faster by setting the pot in a larger pan of cold water. Stir the filling so that it all gets exposed to the cold sides of the pot.) After spreading the filling on the cake, let it set and firm up for a few minutes before putting the top cake layer on it.         White Icing: About 4 tbsp butter 2 egg whites ⅛ tsp salt Powdered sugar Beat the egg whites, salt, and butter together. Add about ½ cup powdered sugar and beat until thoroughly mixed. Then gradually add more powdered sugar, beating well, until the icing is thick enough to spread. This cake is best with a thin layer of icing on it, so keep the icing soft enough to spread it thinly. Sources: cake and icing from a handwritten note; lemon filling adapted from recipe by Mrs. Lawrence Hoerig of Mequon, Wisconsin

The surprise of this recipe is how we got it, not what's in it.

This could have been a hand-me-down recipe, except no one handed it down. Usually, when one has recipes from multiple generations back, they've been passed down and shared. Whether the recipes are written down or whether you learn to make them by helping your relatives in the kitchen, someone deliberately intended their progeny to learn. Or, if people don't get a recipe handed own to them, they reverse-engineer the foods they fondly remember from tables of yore. 

But in this case, none of my relatives recognize the recipe at all. I found this cake recipe in a box of unexamined family things, pressed between a lot of century-old studio portraits of people I'm probably related to.

Some readers will recognize this recipe from a relatively recent post. But since our anniversary happens to land on the end of the week (I di-d not plan this), it's the perfect time for a Second-Stab Saturday for a recipe I really liked. Purely for the heck of it, I posted this to a recipe exchange group and got the most delightful response:

The writing on the page reads like a note-to-self, except the way she wrote "over" on the bottom right corner. It's like she wanted to ensure that whoever found it would know that more instructions await on the back of the page. 

We made one change to the recipe: we rescaled it from 3 to 4 eggs. Now it makes two 9-inch cake layers. However, as much as I wanted to make a layer cake for our anniversary, I didn't want to eat the whole thing. As a compromise with myself, I decided to halve the recipe, cut the single-layer cake in half, and make a two-layer semicircle.

The batter looked unnervingly curdled after I finished mixing it, which is never a good sign. I was so convinced I'd ruined the cake that I re-checked my recipe math to make sure that I had all the ingredient amounts correct.After I confirmed that I had neither miscalculated nor mismeasured, I wondered if the one success we'd had with the recipe was a fluke. 

But the oven was already hot and the pan already prepared to receive batter, so I baked it anyway.  As I waited to see if I got cake or failure on the other side of the baking time, I couldn't help thinking about how this was probably a very economical recipe in the 1920s, which is when I think she wrote it down. But with the graham crackers, the coconut, and the lemons, it's a bit of a splurge today. That makes this cake feel really appropriate for our Anniversary of Cookrye. As they say, treat yourself.

Despite looking like a surefire failure in the mixing bowl, the cake came out perfect after it baked. I discreetly cut out a tiny sample sliver to make sure it was good enough to commit to making the icing and lemon filling. It tasted like a graham cracker pie crust, only in cake form. Its firm yet light texture make me think of birthday cakes.

When it came to making the lemon filling, we didn't worry about tracking down a period-correct recipe this time. We simply took the glaze off the orange-coconut cake and used lemon juice instead. Since the original glaze went onto a cake covered with coconut, it should feel right at home between two cake layers loaded with those tropical white shreds.

To my happiness, the lemon filling actually thickened after cooking it as directed. And after leaving it on the counter to cool off, it firmed up until it was almost gelatinous. In other words, it was perfect for putting between two cake layers.

This may be my one mistake of the recipe: I thought that putting a lot of lemon in the middle would be far better than a parsimoniously thin layer. When I put the other cake on top, all of the excess lemon squeezed out anyway. Also, the two cake layers refused to stay stacked. The top one, lubricated by excessive cake filling, kept sliding off until I put a lot of toothpicks in there. But that's my mistake, not a faulty recipe. If you put a more reasonable amount of lemon filling in the cake, this should not be a problem.

And now, we get to the part of cake-making I always flub: icing them. This time, I forestalled my usual mistake of making too little icing. I thought that surely no visible crumbs would besmirch our creation with visible crumbs (as inevitably happens when I try to scrape too little icing across too much cake). However, we ran into two problems. First, we had to try to spread icing across the open surface of a cut cake without visible crumbs.

Our other problem was space. You need space to decorate a cake. As soon as you have to jam a spatula downward at an awkward angle so you don't knock over any clutter with your elbow, you're going to get a terrible-looking icing job. Second, it's just hard to concentrate on spatula technique when half of your attention is busy trying not to to knock over all the clutter that spawns on the counter when you leave the kitchen unattended. 

In the case of this cake, I could have gotten it to look a lot better had I frozen it, then put a thin, almost runny layer of icing on it, and frozen it again to make it very firm. But again, you need space to do that. All of our freezer shelves are currently loaded with food. Like a lot of people living in a post-2020 world, we keep a lot more food on hand because you never know when the supply chain will hiccup on you. Our freezer could not accommodate a layer cake.

I already knew our decorating wouldn't go well, but I just reminded myself of what my friend said on the subject:

I also reminded myself that usually, even a lousy icing job looks just fine once you've cut the cake.

I may not do the best job of spreading the icing. But I have to say that the egg-white icing that came with this recipe has become my icing of choice when I'm not pouring cinnamon icing on things. The egg white keeps the icing firm in a way that milk or water doesn't. Therefore, you don't need to put in gobs of butter or shortening to make the icing firm enough to use. This way, the icing isn't overwhelmingly rich. Instead, it's a sweet finish to a really good cake.

However, in the case of this cake, you want to perhaps make the icing a little thinner than you normally might. I laid it on a lot thicker than I probably needed to, and most people ended up discreetly scraping it into a little pile on the side of their plates. I'm thinking that you should make the icing just barely too thick to pour like a glaze. Then you could put just a light touch of icing on the cake instead of the generous amount seen here.

The cake was a lot better the first time we made it, when the icing was a thin topping as shown below:

With that said, this cake was so good that no one expressed dismay upon seeing me committing it to a typewritten index card. And by now, everyone knows that if I think a recipe is worth typing, it will appear again. I only put a recipe through the typewriter if it's good enough to take up permanent residence in the recipe box. In a subtle nod to the original recipe's writing style, I added a written note to turn the card over for further instruction. I also misread my recipe notes and therefore had to cross out a few numbers.

I am amused that I have used the words "heretofore," "tedious," and now "unpromising" on recipe cards.

In closing, this is a wonderful way to commemorate the start of a (hopefully) wonderful year of food! 

I'm going to attempt a special cooking project this year. Every month, I want to get out one recipe that I've been meaning to get around to making. Something that's been sitting in my notebooks for a while, a recipe that's long had a bookmark next to it in one of my cookbooks, or a recipe on a webpage I've had saved for longer than I've had my current laptop. May the good things be delicious, and the bad things be entertaining, and may the year bring happy surprises in a saucepan!