It Takes the Cake!

This blog would not be complete if I didn't include some entries about Brandon. Although he is not at the Haven these days, he is in our daily prayers, and we miss him here. It's a little bizarre to have "just" one person missing from the Haven, and yet it sometimes feels like more. Somehow, Brandon is more than just one person when he's not here! (This tells me he leaves a pretty big void!)

Of course, you can find up-to-date information about him at http://www.huffakermission.blogspot.com/, my lone other blog. His weekly emails with news from Jamaica go there. I don't post all of his emails, sometimes I edit what he sends, and some of them are meant just for us. This last week, he sent an email to me with a list of requests for information and recipes. Part of what he is looking for is to be able to substitute ingredients when things are either unavailable, or expensive for them.

So among his requests was to know how to make a cake from scratch. I assume he either can't find mixes or they are cost prohibitive on a missionary's budget. (Some of his other questions were for recipes for things that are commonly found here as mixes or ready-made.)

This posed a dilemma for me: I've never made a cake "from scratch." Seriously.

Stop laughing!

I think part of the reason I've never done it is because I seem to remember my mom telling me it was difficult, time-consuming, and in general, not worth it. Looking back, I suspect she just told me that to put me off so I wouldn't pester her to try it!!

So, I couldn't, in good conscience, send Brandon a recipe that I'd never tried, right??? Surely I would have additional tips and comments to add, if I'd made the recipe myself, at least once.

Not wanting to make things too complicated for him or for me, I reached for my battered (no pun intended), and well-worn copy of Betty Crocker's cookbook. This thing has whole chunks of pages falling out; it's in a pretty bad state. Many of the pages have notes alongside the recipes -- but not in the cakes section! So, knowing that Todd is not a big fan of chocolate (all the more for me anyway), I made a basic white cake, called "Silver White Cake". The one adjustment I made was to cut the recipe in half and do just one layer. I didn't see the point in a whole cake for no-particular-reason, especially when I had just gotten off the treadmill to work out that day. Inspiration at the time was running along the lines of weight-loss and toning the body, not cake, frosting and adding pounds on!

(In the background, you can see the garden tomatoes that are just begging to be made into homemade salsa.)

If I had been Martha Stewart, I wouldn't have used "butter-flavor" shortening. I sure like it for pie crust (which I do make from scratch, thank you!) and cookies, but when you're going for a white cake, the yellow shortening kind of defeats the purpose!

I love, love, love pure vanilla extract. I have to take a sniff every time I open the bottle. Once I was out on my own, it took me a little while to get away from the fake stuff (a hangover habit from my frugal mother), and now I'll never go back! It's so worth it for real vanilla. Martha Stewart would also have used the special clear extract instead of the brown stuff I used, but oh well.

Separated eggs, and adding the whites. The recipe didn't specify, so I added them all at once, but to do it again, I'd add the egg whites one at a time.

I hope Brandon has a mixer, because I don't think you can reasonably do this by beating by hand.

Disappointment! It's sunken in the middle! Whaaaat????? This is the complete opposite of what happens when I make cakes from mixes. Not sure what I did wrong. Maybe it was those dang egg whites? I also took it out of the oven earlier than I expected to, it obviously cooked faster.

Well, a homemade cake-from-scratch deserves homemade frosting from scratch, too. I'm fine with this, because I've made frosting a lot. Ok, well not a lot, but enough. So in keeping with my little white cake, I did a basic Vanilla Butter Frosting to go with it. Sprinkles on top is colored coarse sugar.

Emma tried some of the frosting, too. Look at those eyes! Could you deny her frosting with those eyes looking back at you like that???

We didn't taste the cake until the next day; with ice cream, of course. It tasted good, but I don't think it would win any prizes. I thought it was a bit coarse textured, and not as soft and tender as I would have liked. Like the cake version of an artisan bread.

Better luck next time.

I'll still send Brandon the recipe, but with a few comments and notes for him!