Silver and Gold cakes: or, Is it worth waiting for these to rise?

We at A Book of Cookrye are delighted to have our cake pan back! You see, we made some brownies to take to class, and left them on top of the refrigerator to cool. When we came back the next morning, they were gone. Usually, the top of the refrigerator is fairly safe from thieves, but apparently not for cooling brownies overnight.

Missing: a baked attempt to up my grade. Last seen in this vicinity.

We were thinking about replacing the pan, but we're moving out very soon anyway so we figured we'd do without and either bake in the pot or fold little pans out of foil. However, whoever took it put the empty pan back on top of the refrigerator two days later.

I guess whoever took the pan saw the rust spots and figured whoever hadn't chucked it would would want it back.

To celebrate getting our poor overworked and only cake pan back, we present two nearly-identical recipes! We actually respect the cookbook writer for economizing. You see, the first cake recipe calls for a dozen egg yolks. However, it'd be such a shame to throw out all those egg whites. Abby Fisher, from whose cookbook these recipes come from (previously featured here), apparently thought the same. For what should follow the recipe for a dozen-egg yolk cake but one that calls for a dozen egg whites!

What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, Abby Fisher, 1881
via Feeding America: the Historic American Cookbook Project

Silver and Gold Cakes    Silver Cake: 6 egg whites 1 c butter 1 c sugar 1 envelope yeast 3 tbsp milk 2 c flour Almond or peach extract to taste Grease and flour a round or square cake pan. This cake will really want to stick to the pan, so even if you usually just spray the pan, go ahead and coat it with flour. Stir the flour and yeast together (this prevents the yeast grains from forming lumps that refuse to mix into the batter). Cream the butter and sugar. Beat the egg whites stiff and fold them in (stir in a few spoonfuls to soften the mixture first). Add the flour, milk and extract. Spread this into the pan and put it into a warm (170°-200°) oven to rise for a couple of hours. It may not get very high in the pan, but it should at least start to look foamy. Heat oven to 325° and bake until done.    Gold Cake: Follow the directions for the silver cake. Use 6 egg yolks, whipped until thick and airy, instead of the stiff-beaten egg whites. Flavor it with the rind of one lemon instead of the almond extract. To help release the oils from the rind, rub it together with the sugar before creaming it with the butter. What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, Abby Fisher, 1881

We did both of these cakes in two nights (what else were we going to do with all those egg yolks left over from cracking all those egg whites?), just to see what happened.

A lot of butter and sugar was involved.

We were reading the cake recipes in this book to see what late 1800's cake recipes looked like (you'd be surprised what you find interesting when you have to restrict your web browsing at work to things that will not embarrass you or the organization should patrons see the screen). Aside from the fact that one of the recipes ended with instructions for the dampers on your stove, the biggest difference from one published this century was that both of these recipes use yeast.

It's like baking powder but it smells funny takes a lot longer.

We wondered what the heck a yeast-raised cake would taste like. So, with a massive math final looming over us, we naturally avoided studying at all costs and made for the kitchen. Besides, since our mixer died, we whip egg whites like this.

Now, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to say that we've finally gotten good at this whole folding-in-egg-whites business. We can fold the heck out of egg whites and whatever we fold them in will still be foamy(ish).

We're so good at folding in egg whites that we don't have lumpy batter. Our batter has clusters of handmade charm.

You can therefore imagine our disappointment when we found that the recipe calls for so much flour you have to beat the crap out of the batter and lose all the air you just carefully incorporated.

But, figuring that the jelly cake did the exact same thing but rose anyway, we hoped that the whole stiffly-beaten egg whites business was in fact going to pay off and somehow having beaten then re-flattened the egg whites would make the cake rise until light and fluffy.

As much as we like dense cakes, we're not going to do all this business with beaten egg whites and busting out the yeast to do what we could have ready to bake in less than 5 minutes.

The recipe doesn't mention letting the cake rise, but it seemed an obvious step. Why would anyone put yeast in a recipe and then not let it rise? The batter rose surprisingly slowly given that there was plenty of sugar in it for the yeasts to eat. But, more unnervingly, the butter started to separate out and float on top. You can see little butter puddles forming on top of the batter.

We gave it two hours during which time it barely if at all rose), but eventually we decided that we'd take a short cake rather than wait even longer for it to rise. However, once the oven got hot, it rose to nearly the top of the pan!

That's the silver cake done. But what might one do with all those egg yolks? We make a gold cake, of course!
This may surprise you, but since the  recipes for silver and gold cakes (does anyone else have that song from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in their head after reading that?) vary only in which part of the egg you use, making the gold cake was just about identical to making the silver cake.

The difference between silver and gold is cholesterol.

Now, we at A Book of Cookrye are, we will admit, prone to the odd baking mistake. When making the silver cake, we were too caught up in thinking "Gorsh, who knew you could put yeast in a cake?" to remember that we were supposed to add milk to the batter at some point. We did remember to add it when making the gold cake, and it made no visible difference. Upon seeing the recipe call for half a teacupful, we even messaged a friend who has an old tea set asking her to measure how much one of the teacups held (answer: exactly ¾ cup).

Should cake batter be able to hold up a spoon?

And now, we present, the Silver and Gold Cakes!

As you can see, the gold cake is the exact color of cornbread. It also dented really easily (you can see some dents where my fingers were as I lifted it out). The silver cake is more of an off-white cake than a really white cake.
Both of these cakes were really good. The silver cake tasted a lot like the sweets at a Mexican bakery, and we weren't the only ones who thought so. Specifically, it's a lot like the pandulces with the sesame seeds on top. Since hardly anyone puts yeast in cakes these days, the yeast flavor made one confused. It's like, the yeast tastes like bread, but it's actually cake. As someone else said, "It's one of a kind." The almond extract in it made every girl who tried a piece say "It smells kind of like my lotion!"
The gold cake tasted more like we would expect a cake to be today. However, it was really crumbly. The yeast changed the flavor just enough that most people did not recognize it as lemon. One person thought it had ginger in it. Someone else said it tastes like Christmas cookies.
However, everyone who tried a piece of either cake really liked it. They're just different enough from a modern-day cake recipe to be intriguing, and both of them are seriously delicious. So, if you were already going to make yeast-raised bread, why not put it to the side of the oven and let a cake rise next to it?

Hump-Day Quickie: Waffle Iron Potatoes!

We at A Book of Cookrye have not been endowed with a lot of extra time lately. Nevertheless, everyone must eat. With that in mind, we asked ourselves "Do we really have to wait for the oven?"

Waffle Iron Potatoes  Potatoes Salt (or seasonings to taste) Heat waffle iron. Slice potatoes (don't bother peeling them unless you don't like the skins) and rub generously with salt. Grease the iron well and cook the potatoes until done- 1 or 2 minutes. Test with a fork to check if they're done.

You know how potatoes usually take forever to cook? These were done in less than 5 minutes.

So if you too need to eat something now and don't have the makings of sandwiches lying around, consider putting what you would have cooked another way on the waffle iron. You'll also get lots of (perfectly orthogonal) crispy brown bits on both sides.

Homemade Garlic Knots: or, My math class is cancelled!

Ever felt like all your woe and misery just melted in your brain and came pouring out through your ears? Well, we at A Book of Cookrye have felt that delightful, divoon state of being! It almost felt like I was in a rain of misery, and that all the negativity clogging up my head been washed away and was dripping to the floor. Want to know what caused this all-consuming frisson of happiness? My math class was dismissed an hour early, and the teacher announced that the next class is cancelled!
I came in from class and shouted "MY MATH CLASS GOT OUT EARLY AND GOT CANCELLED NEXT WEEK!" Everyone in the common room started clapping! It was like my joy spread to everyone!

You'd be happy too if you'd spent a whole semester doing this.

To celebrate this marvelous liberation (and the sudden gift of a lot of free time), we at A Book of Cookrye decided to pull out an idea we've been sitting on for some time: Garlic knots! There's this pizza place up the street from us that makes some really good garlic knots that you get free if you go during lunch hours. We at A Book of Cookrye decided to use some garlic sauce we pinched from the last time they ordered pizza for everyone doing theater sets (see how divoon we think garlic sauce is here) and see if we can't have garlic knots in the convenience of our own domicile.

Garlic Rolls ¼ c shortening ½ c + 2 tbsp milk ¼ c sugar 1 envelope yeast 2-3 c flour ¼ c sugar 1 tsp salt 1 egg 2 (1-oz) containers garlic dipping sauce (the kind you get from pizza delivery) Heat the milk and shortening until melted. You can do it on the stove stirring constantly, but microwaving it will be a lot easier and you won't be trying to keep the milk from burning in the pot. Cool to 120°-130°. Mix a generous 1½ c flour, the sugar, the salt, and the yeast. Add the milk and shortening, mix thoroughly. Add the egg and beat well. Then add the remaining flour-the dough should be sticky and barely firm enough to knead. Knead until smooth, it should be about 3 minutes. Then let it rise until doubled in size. Punch the dough down and divide it in half. Have a clean, floured surface ready. Thoroughly coat one portion of dough in flour and roll it out to quarter-inch thickness. Take a container of garlic sauce and pour half of it onto the dough. Spread it out (you may as well use your fingers since they're probably already sticky and dough-covered anyway), then roll the dough up like cinnamon rolls. Wet the edges that will make up the seam, then press and pinch it closed. Slice it into about half-inch pieces, then put them onto a large, greased cookie sheet. Repeat with the other portion of dough. Take the other container of garlic sauce. Pour a little bit of it on top of each roll. Place into the oven. Turn the oven to 170° (or whatever its lowest setting is), then turn it off. Let the rolls rise until they're a nice, good size. Then bake at 350° until nice and golden on top. SPJST 100th Anniversary Cookbook, 1997 For the sake of record, this bread recipe was originally part of a recipe for runzas. You wrap the dough around a filling of ground beef, onion, and cabbage. It's really delicious as plain rolls, or you can roll it into a scroll with cinnamon sugar and have some divoon cinnamon rolls.

Do you want to know what else we at A Book of Cookrye are delighted to celebrate? Check out this price tag!

Our Mom always taught us that it's rude to talk about how much you paid for things. However, proclaiming how steeply discounted you got something is fair game.

And so, we at A Book of Cookrye, like all Americans, begin this delightful, delicious, de-lovely recipe like so many Americans would: a blob of solid saturated fat!

The one thing that concerned us was whether the 25¢ yeast would actually rise. Was it marked down because it had all died and was sitting in the envelope all sad and deceased? However, the thin runny proto-bread sludge smelled very strongly of yeast. So we figured the little yeast granules must still be alive!

This is going to be so good...

You know what, let's pretend that we didn't have to add extra water because it was too dry, and then add more flour because we overwatered it and made it pathetically runny, and had to continue compensating with ever-stickier hands until we could knead it. We'll just skip to the part where we kneaded it because we finally got the bread dough to come out right.

Looka that! It's perfect!

It may be that the yeast was 25¢ (and we are more than slightly delighted that we need to use a cent sign to type out the price) because it took a while to wake up. However, after spending a while in the warm oven, the yeast eventually started furiously flatulating that the bread could rise. And so, we at A Book of Cookrye got this!

Huzzah for farting microbes!

All right, this is where we get to the super exciting part: turning what would have already been some delicious bread into some divoon garlic knots! With garlic!

We at A Book of Cookrye recommend using two garlics for this recipe.

We originally thought we would take the "knot" in "garlic knot" literally. We thought we'd roll the dough into snakes, slather them in garlic sauce, and knot them. That did not work. The dough refused to stay in knots. so we ended up doing this like cinnamon rolls.

I REGRET NOTHING.

We at A Book of Cookrye then realized that we lacked a pan big enough for baking these all at once. The idea of baking in batches gets a lot less appealing when you realize that you'll have to wait for each batch to rise. Instead, this happened:

Custom-fitted cookie sheets!

A protip for those doing this at home: If you use only one layer of foil, whatever you set on it will immediately fall between the bars on the oven rack. You want at least three layers so it's sufficiently supportive. You know this has been a long semester for us at A Book of Cookrye because someone else had to suggest we layer the foil. We had been staring at our carefully shaped garlic rolls falling through the oven and muttering "Shit!" and unable to think of any way to come up with something to make this work.

Dolloped with extra garlic and ready to rise!

We knew these would be good because you could see all the garlic sauce soak into them as they rose. None of it dripped away; it all went into the bread. The smell coming out of the kitchen as they rose was amazing. So many people came into the kitchen asking what was cooking ("Garlic bread? Can I have one when they're done?") that we began to deeply regret cutting the original recipe in half.

This bread comes with dipping sauce.

As hoped, these were amazing. Do yourself a favor. Make them.

Lemon Schaum Torte, or RIP my mixer

We at A Book of Cookrye would like to take the time to salute our long-lived electric mixer, which recently decided it had lived long enough.

Go forth in peace, handheld Sunbeam Mixmaster.

Estimated to have entered this world in the 70's, the Book of Cookrye mixer was at least old enough to have been made in the USA. It was very good to us while it lasted, but now is not the time to do without a replacement.
We at A Book of Cookrye began to ponder what we might get to replace it. Hand mixers tend to have relatively weak motors. While we do have a stand mixer sitting under the counter at our parents' house, we haven't got the space for it. Since we have half a bedroom and no more personal space to store anything, we cannot have very many bulky things. Actually, we have room for very few single-purpose devices, which leads us to the replacement...

We would like to thank our parents for inadvertently donating a whisk.

How many people can use their mixer to hang pictures and assemble IKEA furniture? It's like finding out your floor wax is also a dessert topping! After first testing it with some really simple just-put-it-in-a-bowl-and-stir recipes, we decided to really put it to work. While considering what recipes might be worthwhile for our mixer (in an electric mixer promotional cookbook, of course!), we found this one:

All Electric-Mix Recipes Prepared Specially for your Dormeyer Mixer. 1946

I think a meringue shell with whipped cream and whipped custard is a pretty good way to test an electric mixer, don't you? Well, it doesn't show how well the mixer does with really heavy loads, but we'll perpetrate something else to try that out later. Let's get to the meringue!

You wish your mixer had a flashlight.

Unfortunately, it seems that a power drill is not the best implement for whipping things. As soon as the whisk gets spinning, it kicks whatever you aspire to whip to the sides of the bowl instead of forcing air into it. We had better luck tipping everything sideways, but it seems something about the way two beaters on a mixer turn into each other are better for whipping things than one whirligig with a motor attached.

Oddly enough, the regular beater was better for first getting the egg whites frothy, but the whisk was better at turning the foam into a meringue.

We at A Book of Cookrye have done a lot of meringues because they're tasty. Every time we do, we wonder how this happened when we made kisses.

That's a deadly looking spike, isn't it?

Seriously, that's not just stiff peaks, that's fearsome spikes of sugar! But most of the time, regardless of how stiff we beat the egg whites before adding anything, they get really floppy when we add the sugar to them.

There's nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to egg whites all the time!

Seriously, and this isn't the first time our meringues have gone flaccid on contact with sugar, no amount of beating them has ever produced that stiff a meringue ever since. After about ten minutes on high speed, we gave up and figured we'd just pour it in the pan and hope it didn't melt into something flat in the oven.

It's actually a lot more concave than it looks.

While we've got the custard beating, let's pause and discuss the viability of power tools as kitchen implements. If you look around on YouTube, you will find many people using power drills to make cakes. However, they seem to shy away from recipes that involve an extended beating time. We at A Book of Cookrye are here to tell you that if you do make something that involves an extended beating time, do not use a cordless power drill. The battery pack gets heavy quickly when you're holding it up over a bowl for 10-15 minutes. We ended up having to take a page out of Miss Leslie's book and hold the thing at our side because it is too fatiguing to extend one's arm while holding a weight for that long. Also, unless you invested in a good cordless drill, you will have to recharge the battery between beating the egg whites into a meringue and getting to the rest of the recipe.
After letting the battery and our arm recharge, we got to putting the lemon in the lemon schaum torte. We beat the yolks until thick, but they turned gray instead of lemon-colored.

You can really tell how gray they ended up when you see the lemon peel in the pot with them.

Pictured: Egg yolks beaten until lemon-colored, actual lemon.

Meanwhile, we withdrew the meringue shell from the oven. It actually looked pretty good. I mean, it's basically a meringue cookie but made to American portion-size standards, so it was guaranteed to be delicious whether we went on with the rest of this schaum torte business or just ate it as-is.

As a bonus, it actually sort of held its shape.

However, despite all the greasing and flouring of the pan, it did not want to come out. We prodded at the sides with the handle of a tea strainer. We held it upside-down hoping it would fall out. Eventually, we put it upside-down on the counter and soundly thwacked the bottom of the pan. Behold how well that worked!

We successfully cracked it and broke off meringue shards!

The ultimate removal process involved deciding that no one was going to see the damage once we covered this sucker in whipped cream. (Incidentally, we're assuming that the recipe writers left out the instruction to add sugar to taste to the cream when whipping it. I mean, would you want a mouthful of straight cream?)

Whipped cream hides a multitude of sins.

We at A Book of Cookrye took the liberty of tasting the lemon filling, and it was really good. You could have dumped it into a pie shell had the lemon pie of your dreams. We had to keep how good it tasted in mind when facing the fact that it looked like boogers.

It looked even worse when we tried to spread it over the whipped cream. Now we had weird curdled nasty-looking things suspended in white stuff.

But once again, the whipped cream hid many sins. Behold!

Doesn't that look good enough to eat?

You'd never guess that earlier this looked like it was a snot sandwich.

Now came the most painful part of this recipe. We would not have made this had we read this far down in the instructions before beginning. Tragically, it says "Chill in refrigerator 24 hours." CURSES AND DRAT! I have no shame in admitting we made a batch of cookies because we'd been banking on having dessert tonight, not in 24 hours. Besides, we had to face the reality that the snot filling would once again be visible when cut.

I promise it tastes like lemon!

Incidentally, that plate came to us by way of a weird anonymous gift. I came home to find it stacked with my dishes (which are on a stand next to the door). My roommate told me someone knocked, then reached through in door without getting more than an arm in the room, set the plate with the dishes, then left without saying anything.
The lemon shaum torte was divoon. It was amazeballs. It was orgasmic. It's like a lemon meringue cloud of deliciousness. If there was ever a recipe that justified getting an electric mixer instead of doing it all by hand, this is it. If you don't have an electric mixer, go forth, get one, and make this!

Hump-Day Quickie with Extra Garlic: Making your pizza delivery last longer!

We at A Book of Cookrye have often been asked do we ever do drive-thru? Are we really so snooty that we would turn down [insert junk food of choice here]? To answer that question with a resounding NO!, and because we've been near-perpetually busy and therefore haven't had time to do anything more complicated than sandwiches lately, we present...

Book of Cookrye shopping tip: If you don't mind having HECHO EN MEXICO rather than Italian designs on the packaging, your pasta will get a lot cheaper.

I fricken love that garlic sauce that comes with pizza delivery. If people don't eat the garlic sauce, we will gladly pocket all of them. (No, we do not pinch them before anyone else has had a chance to open one because we are not jerks that way. However, if the pizza is gone and the garlic sauce remains untouched....)

For the record, one little tub of garlic sauce is just right for half a bag of spaghetti. (Also, you want to salt the cooking pot until it's like seawater.) Do try this at home!

Oatmeal Carmelitas: or, Yes, we still have Halloween candy

Ever had those recipes that you've been wondering about for a long time but never made? Well, we at A Book of Cookrye decided to bring out one of those and see if we would regret letting it sit so long unmade.

Oatmeal Carmelitas ½ c butter ¾ c light brown sugar ½ tsp soda Pinch salt 1 c flour 1 c oatmeal ¼ c milk 7 oz (25 or so) caramels Heat oven to 350°. Line a 9" round cake pan with foil, then grease it. (You don't technically have to use foil, but you'll be glad you did.) Cream the butter and sugar. Mix in the soda and salt. Then add the flour, mixing well. Lastly, add the oatmeal. Mix well. Divide the dough in half. Set one portion aside, then press the other half into the bottom of the pan. The easiest way to do this is to sprinkle it over the bottom of the pan like you're doing a crumb topping, then pat and press it until it is flat and has no holes. Bake it for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, melt the caramels in the milk. You can do it over medium heat stirring constantly, or you can microwave it and stir every 30 seconds. When the crust is baked, pour the melted candy over it, tilting the pan to spread it out. Then sprinkle the remaining cookie dough over it as a crumb topping. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until lightly browned on top. They're easiest to cut while still warm, but not right out of the oven as you'll get a sticky mess. Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars, Ceil Dyer, 1992

Those looking to save time can do what other versions of the same recipe do: skip the bother of melting candy and just open a jar of caramel syrup. However, we at A Book of Cookrye have discounted Halloween candy!

Oh heck yes.

 
We at A Book of Cookrye have a particularly deep-set weakness for discounted holiday candy. We regularly go to the candy aisle every November 1st for trick-or-treat candy, December 26 for chocolate Santas... you get the idea. One of our fondest memories was when we got to the CVS right as they opened on November 1st one year and thus were there as they were moving the contents of the Halloween aisle to the discount bins. The employees took to stopping where we stood as they carried bags of candy and asking "Were you going to want these?" before depositing them with the other things on clearance. Rarely do we have the glorious experience of having shop attendants proffer merchandise to us and furthermore getting everything half off. Another year, we and a group of friends went into the supermarket on December 26. One of the cashiers pointed and said "It's all over that way" before we were all through the door.
 We've often thought of doing a Year of Asynchronous Candy should we ever do entertaining. What better way to celebrate love of discounts than to give heart-shaped chocolate boxes to everyone who came over for Easter and candy pumpkins on Christmas?

Incidentally, this cookie dough is so good.

You should know that even if you skip the melted candy filling, this makes pretty good cookies. Just press it in the pan and then cut it into squares after baking.

All right, this is where we get to the good part of this recipe! Are you as excited as you should be?

This is gonna be so good....

We at A Book of Cookrye don't know why this brought us such an inexplicable amount of joy. But it did.

At this point we were giggling to ourselves in ecstatic, anticipating-a-divoon-sugar-high glee.

Oh boy oh boyohboyohboy....

As a brief note, if you can somehow restrain yourself from either licking the bowl of melted candy or dripping some over ice cream, you have no soul.

La vie, c'est si bon!

I don't think there's any point in saying how divoon these are because it should be obvious. You owe it to yourself to make them. Seriously, go get some fun-sized candy bars and do it. Also, we at A Book of Cookrye think the added chocolate coating made this a lot better than had we used plain caramels. So if you don't have any caramel Milky Ways waiting for you at the store, throw in a handful of chocolate chips.

Incidentally, one person thought these tasted a lot like pecan pie.