the good old days

Last month, Recovered Recipes posted a recovered recipe that really caught my interest — Mock Salmon Roast.

Mock Salmon Roast
1 1/2 cups grated carrot
1 cup cooked rice
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 cup warm milk
1 egg
2 T oil
1 medium onion
Sage and salt to taste

Mix peanut butter with warm milk until blended. Add remaining ingredients and mix until combined. Bake at 350F for 45-60 minutes.

I was very curious to see whether peanut butter, rice, sage, and carrots would manage to come even close to tasting like salmon. I’m also curious how somebody came up with this recipe. If I’m thinking of salmon loaf, then thinking of potential replacement ingredients, “peanut butter and carrots” wouldn’t be the first that come to mind. But then I realized there wasn’t anything coming to mind. “Salmon loaf” means “salmon”, and it’s hard to shift the omnivore train of thought once it’s on the tracks.

By far the weirdest step was mixing peanut butter into warm milk. It doesn’t really smoothly blend, it just turns into tiny peanut butter globules floating in milk — mixed enough for the recipe, but odd to look at.

I almost forgot to add the rice, which would have really ruined the texture.

It definitely needs to be baked in a loaf pan (or even a small casserole dish), because prior to baking, it’s very liquid.

I admit, it’s not much to look at. It’s all squishy and flat. (I wasn’t concentrating on presentation; a bed of lettuce would drastically improve the visual aesthetic.)

But the taste is pretty good!

Vegetarian and vegan meals can be absolutely delicious. When you try to make vegetarian versions of specific meat dishes, however, things can get dicey — there are very few dishes which authentically emulate the flavor and texture of what they’re pretending to be. (Most people have tried a veggie burger once in their life, and said, “Well, well, that doesn’t taste like beef at all.”) The trick is to stop pretending that you’re eating a non-vegetarian dish. Our local health food store makes some very good meals, such as Vegan Chicken Kiev — if you take a bite of Vegan Chicken Kiev and expect it to taste exactly like a chicken cutlet filled with butter, you’ll be disappointed. Once you start thinking of it as a totally different dish (faux-chicken wrapped around some sort of rice-and-herb stuffing, then breaded), it’s delicious.

And that was the case with the Mock Salmon Loaf. It’s a healthy meal, with vegetables and protein and carbohydrates all mixed together in one convenient package. It tastes interesting (in a good way) and has a nice texture. It even looks like a pinky-orange meatloaf, just as a “real” salmon loaf does. But it doesn’t taste exactly like salmon, unless you haven’t had salmon in a very long time.

I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing

Apple pie with a dutch crumb topping (Miranda @ A Duck in Her Pond)

Buttermilk spice cake (Mary @ One Perfect Bite)

Chocolate cherry pie

Dilly Potato Salad (Gloria @ Cookbook Cuisine)

Election Day Cake

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie

I will update links to all the previous delicious entries as I get them.

For the letter “F” recipe, I had a dish in mind that I had bookmarked a while ago. (I could probably manage almost any letter of the alphabet, including Q — my “to cook” bookmark folder has something like a hundred retro recipes, with varying levels of ewww). So on Sunday, I cheerfully pulled up the bookmark for what I had labelled as “Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie”, and realized the recipe name was actually “Christmas Meringue Pie.”Whatever. I’m BRINGING fruit cocktail meringue pie, that’s all I know.

This recipe comes from Flickr, from a vintage advertisement unsettlingly titled, “Look what you can do with fruit cocktail and dairy foods!”

Fruit Cocktail Meringue Pie: Combine 1 envelope Knox gelatine, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp salt in top of double boiler. Stir in 3/4 cup syrup from fruit cocktail, 2 beaten egg yolks. Cook over boiling water, stirring often, 15 minutes, till slightly thickened. Remove from heat, stir in 1 cup commercial sour cream, 2 tbsps lemon juice. Cool till thickened. Fold in 1-1/2 cup drained canned fruit cocktail. Turn into baked 9-inch pie shell. Top with Marshmallow Meringue. Sprinkle with toasted coconut. Chill 2 hours or longer.

For meringue: melt 16 marshmallows with 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1 tbsp syrup from fruit cocktail, over low heat, stirring often. Cool. Beat 2 egg whites with 1/4 tsp salt till stiff. Gradually beat in 1/4 cup sugar. Fold in marshmallow mixture.

I didn’t expect this to be complicated by just glancing over the recipe, but it turns out to require double-boiling a custard, chilling for a couple hours, melting marshmallows, and beating egg whites. Rather like Election Day Cake, there’s a lot of effort required — the question was whether it would pay off in the end.

A zabaglione is a very fussy egg-yolk custard, requiring stirring in a bowl over steam (or using a double boiler, if your kitchen is so endowed) until your arm falls off or the mixture thickens. I was rather surprised to see it showing up in a fruit cocktail pie recipe, particularly including gelatin and then being added to sour cream; it seems with thickeners like that, you wouldn’t really need to cook your egg yolk until it solidified. I suppose they did that just to put the separated eggs to full use or something.

Note my ultra-fancy, incredibly upscale double boiler. (I don’t recommend trying this if you don’t have a Pyrex bowl, though.)

Putting a tasty zabaglione in with sour cream just feels wrong somehow, but for the moment I’ll trust the recipe…

Melting marshmallows is fun. We also have a recipe for grasshopper pie which requires marshmallow melting, and it’s great to see them slowly shrinking and turning to thick goo.

After assembly, chilling, and a sprinkling of coconut, it looks really impressive.

It’s a little on the sweet side, and definitely very firm (which means it will stand up well to being in summer heat for our picnic). Overall, it’s tasty and fun. Would I want to make it again… maybe for a special occasion. (The ice cream Jell-o pie is a lot less work, albeit also a lot meltier.)

Reading through a gelatin cookbook (something published by either Jell-O or Knox, usually) is an exercise in controlling nausea. These are the people that brought you such brilliant innovations as Frankfurters in Goo, or Pie Plate Salad — not known for good taste.

I was feeling rather over-berried today — strawberries have been on sale in supermarkets, the local health food store, and the farmers market, plus Daughter went on a field trip to a local strawberry patch and brought a load home. Since I had peach-flavored Jell-O on hand, I made a peach version of this instead.

• dissolve 1 package (3 oz.) any flavor of Jell-O Gelatin in 1-3/4 cups of boiling water
• stir in 1 pint of vanilla ice cream until melted
• chill until very thick
• fold in 1 cup of drained, sweetened, sliced, fresh strawberries or 1 package (10 oz.) drained, thawed Birds Eye Strawberry Halves
• pour into 8″ crumb crust
• chill until firm
• garnish with more berries

Oddly, the recipe inventors (and/or marketing department) seems to have had little confidence in this recipe being able to stand on its own. It’s combined with an offer to send you a quarter if you send in 6 Jell-O boxes. Unfortunately, the 25 cent rebate offer expired in 1963. (Just missed it!)

Just like Pie Plate Salad, this is a “dump and mix” recipe. Simple to do.

I actually deceived myself into thinking this was even easier that it is, and dumped the jellied ice cream into the pie crust without letting it chill first. This didn’t exactly cause problems with the filling solidifying, but it did mean that I wasn’t able to fit all the mixture into the pie crust. (The excess went into an extra bowl and allowed to set there; the kids liked getting a few dollops of that for a treat over the next few days.)

This is a quick, easy, and tasty pie. I’ll certainly keep it in mind when I want to take something sweet and cold to a potluck or picnic. (The only disconcerting part is that the peach-flavored Jell-O is much more pink than orange, but it’s not distracting enough to ruin the dish — and you can always just use a different flavor of fruit.)

Advertisement originally posted on Flickr by TheDamnMushroom

I owe all of you an apology; I have been sitting on this post for a little over a week, waiting for just one or two photos to be added while I messed around with thermodynamics homework instead. (Did you know you can construct your own tables of thermodynamics saturation properties even if you only know a few experimentally determined points on the curve? It’s true! Only a few nasty partial differential equations required…)

Alright, sorry — less geek, more cake!

I’m actually not the first blogger to try to make this. Looking for a retro cake recipe for Buzz’s birthday, I stumbled across a pretty cool blog: Culinary Types. T.W. Barritt has cooked a variety of vintage cake recipes, including Election Cake, Watermelon Cake (extremely cute), and Gumdrop Cake. The latter recipe originally came from The Old Foodie’s 2008 cake week.

The Gumdrop Cake seems to have burst onto the culinary scene in America and Canada in the 1940’s, and was promoted as a novel alternative to traditional Christmas Cake. This version is from the Lilly Wallace New American Cook Book of 1946.

Gumdrop Cake.
½ cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 ¼ cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup milk
¾ cup raisins
1 pound gumdrops, black ones removed, chopped finely.

Cream butter, while adding sugar and beaten eggs. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together over chopped candy and raisins. Dredge well. Add vanilla to milk and add flour mixture and milk, to first mixture alternately. Bake in a large greased loaf tin in a slow oven (275 to 300 degrees F) [140-150 degrees C] 1 ½ hours.

Cutting the gumdrops into little pieces is boring. I sat watching TV and using kitchen shears to cut each one into quarters, and it took almost an hour to get through a bag of gumdrops; the scissors kept getting glued up with sugar and gelatin. The result was good (teeny weeny gumdrop bits are better in the cake), but I’m not sure it was worth the time investment.

And after the gumdrop chopping, they got mixed in with flour… and I realized after the fact it would have been better to have been dropping the bits into the flour as I went, rather than mixing the big sticky mountain in all at once. Oh well, I’d already wasted that much time on cutting up gumdrops, why not waste more time dredging? (Again, the results were good… just took a while to get there.)

And then after baking for an hour and a half, I was feeling pretty impatient — and so I tried to flip the cake out onto the cooling rack without actually checking that it was cooked through.

It wasn’t.

Luckily, cake of this consistency has a pretty dense crumb, and it can handle being scraped off the counter, dumped back in the pan, and baked a while longer… it just ended up being a little lumpy on top.

This does indeed look very much like a fruitcake, with candy rather than candied fruit (unfortunately removing the option of pretending fruitcake is nutritious). And from the description, that definitely seems to be the intent. The kids absolutely love it, and Buzz likes it a lot. Personally, I find it a little TOO sweet and chewy; I think it’s the squishy gumdrop consistency that’s really not doing it for me. Plus all the preparatory work made it a very involved project, a little too much effort for the result. Next time, I’ll skip the gumdrops and just stick with candied fruit bits — something everyone in the family likes, including me.

For Buzz’s birthday cake this year, he asked for a retro recipe… and of course, I was happy to oblige. A search of various sources turned up a number of options, the most interesting of which was “Lady Goldenglow Second Mystery Cake” from my Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook. It’s been mentioned on Kitchen Retro, which thankfully had an authentic picture.

Of course, the name Lady Goldenglow gives you no clue as to what’s in the cake. Taking a look at the ingredients, though…

1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
3 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon pure orange extract
1-1/2 ounces baking chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 and butter 2 layer-cake pans.

Cream the butter until soft and light. Gradually add the sugar, beating well and stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl at least once. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.

Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl, and add to the batter in thirds, alternating with the milk. Remove half the batter to a separate bowl. Add the orange extract to the batter remaining in the first bowl, and mix thoroughly. Add the melted chocolate and vanilla extract to the second bowl and mix well. Divide the batter between the cake pans by tablespoons: first one of the orange mixture, then one of the chocolate, and so on.

Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

Turns out it’s “orange and chocolate marbled cake”. Mmmmm.

Intriguingly, Lady Goldenglow has changed since the 30’s, morphing from a orange-chocolate marbled cake with orange and/or chocolate icing, to chocolate cake and icing with orange flavoring added. British chef Nigella Lawson has a recipe on her website for “Lady Goldenglow Chocolate Cake,” the most modern version I could find. (I also found a Norwegian version, but I don’t speak Norwegian so I can’t say much more about it.)

The original recipe makes a fairly standard cake, aside from the batter marbling. Separating the batter in half and adding different flavors to each isn’t that hard, and creates a very neat effect.

The frosting suggestions from Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook differ slightly from the Kitchen Retro version; rather than orange frosting on top and chocolate-orange on the sides, it gives an orange buttercream frosting recipe and an orange whipped cream frosting recipe. We put the whipped cream between the layers, frosted the outside with buttercream, and then decorated the edges with plain chocolate (left over from some cupcakes last week).

And wow. These are, well, the icing on the cake. Both frostings are delightfully citrus-flavored, and chocolate accents on top are a wonderful contrast. (Chocolate sprinkles or, even fancier, chocolate shavings would be just as decadent.)

This is by far the best cake I have ever made, retro or not. I admit that I took more care than I usually might with a retro recipe, but the deliciousness is due to the recipe itself. If you’re looking for a cake a step above “yellow”, I definitely recommend a Lady Goldenglow. (Plus the name is a great conversation starter, as everyone tries to figure out why exactly it’s called that.)

Ah, early March — the days are warming up, you can finally ditch your heavy winter coat, and you’re looking eagerly at that grill on your back patio. Time for a tasty cookout! Throw some frankfurters on the grill, gang, it’s time to try…

That’s right, deviled hot dogs! via Do What Now? You can tell it’s delicious and edgy because it’s deviled!

OK, there’s nothing particularly devilish about the hot dogs themselves; it’s all in the homemade barbecue sauce that French’s is suggesting will be just perfect if you use as many French’s products as possible.

Deviled Hot Dogs with Frenchwise Barbecue Sauce

Slash tops of frankfurters, brown in skillet. Baste and serve with Frenchwise Sauce.

1 medium onion minced (or 1 tblsp. French’s Onion Flakes)
1 small green pepper minced (or 1 tblsp. French’s Pepper Flakes)
3/4 cup ketchup
2 tblsp. butter or margarine
2 tblsp. brown sugar
2 tblsp. French’s Prepared Mustard
1 tablespoon French’s Worcestershire Sauce
1 tsp. salt

Combine ingredients, simmer 15 min. Serves 8.

The ingredients are quite colorful, but a little scary — I really don’t expect this to turn out well.

Since I was using real vegetables instead of French’s flakes, I decided to fry them in the butter first before stirring in the other ingredients (which probably wouldn’t need much simmering to blend their flavors). Once the peppers and onions were soft I added the sugar, salt, and worshersher sauce… and wow, that is a delicious sauce all on its own, with enough sugar to make it into a neat glaze.

I regretted having to add the mustard, although it tasted pretty decent once it was stirred in.

And I really regretted adding the ketchup, which washed out all but the gentlest hint of the other flavors. This might look like mustard-based barbecue sauce from the way the advertisement is laid out, but it’s definitely a ketchup-based sauce.

I was also surprised to see that it looks EXACTLY like the blood-red bowl of goo in the advertisement.

Sadly, I thought I had taken a picture of the hot dogs slathered with sauce after cooking, but I was wrong and didn’t realize it until they were all gone. Here’s a picture of them lightly basted while in the skillet, instead…

This is surprisingly good. Don’t misunderstand, it isn’t fine dining; but it’s by far the best ketchup I’ve ever tasted. It’s sweeter and more interesting than plain ketchup, but not so spicy that kids (or average 1950’s American adult) would refuse to eat it. I definitely recommend fresh diced vegetables rather than flakes (can you even get green pepper flakes nowadays?), which adds both texture and nutritional value; cutting the ketchup down to 1/2 cup (or farther) wouldn’t hurt.

But it’s just extra-fancy ketchup. It isn’t barbecue sauce, and it sure isn’t “deviled”, which historically means a particularly hot and/or spicy dish. I’m not a huge fan of spicy food, but I feel sorry for anyone who finds the level of spice in “Frenchwise Sauce” to be devilishly high.

Hamentaschen are cookies made for Purim — or really anytime you want a buttery cookie with tasty filling. Since the holiday commemorates Esther’s defeat of Haman, the cookies are (according to some traditions) shaped like Haman’s hat. Therefore, feel free to chant, “Haha, we ate your hat!” while eating. (THAT is NOT a generally accepted tradition, it’s just something my daughter started last year.) It’s likely that the pastry existed (as montashn) before the hat idea, and then one day somebody said, “Hey, these cookies look just like a hat,” and things snowballed from there.

Hamentaschen can be filled with pretty much anything sweet; apricot, raspberry, or prune jam are some of the most common. But I like to make mine with poppy seed filling, because it’s one of the few recipes that call for more than a light sprinkling.

Poppy Seed Filling
1 cup (250 ml) poppy seed
1 cup (250 ml) milk
1 oz. (30 g) butter
2 tbsp. (30 ml) honey
1 tart apple, grated

Bring poppy seed and milk to boil, add butter and honey, and boil until thick. Cool, then add grated apple.
– via jewishappleseed.org, which also has a recipe for the cookie dough

You can also make poppy seed filling for strudel, or probably any cake or cookie that would usually have a fruit jam filling. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s worth trying.

The ingredients are pretty simple, aside from ONE WHOLE CUP of poppy seeds. (You WILL test positive for opiates if you eat this, FYI…)

One reason I like this picture is because it shows a strong contrast between how I prep ingredients (get something out, measure it, put main container away), and how Buzz preps ingredients (get everything out, measure it… take a picture). It is one of the rare areas of life in which he is more disorganized than I am.

Pouring honey onto melting butter is just pretty.

And after everything boils and congeals for a while, it begins to look kinda weird. Actually, it begins to look like various volcanic formations in central Oregon, such as the land around Lava Butte.

We had a very, very nice vacation around Bend one summer. It’s fun to trek around the rocky, lumpy, bizarre landscape, and then picture the same trip if you were a pioneer in a covered wagon and the National Park Service hadn’t gotten around to putting in sidewalks yet and you didn’t have an air-conditioned hotel to return to — it’s quite likely you would have thought you were literally in hell. (Lava Butte photograph from US Geological Survey.)

Anyway, we were talking about cookies.

To make the triangle shape, roll out the cookie dough and cut it into circles. Any diameter is fine, although smaller cookies will hold less filling. Then, fold up the three sides so there is a sort of cup around the filling, and pinch/squish the corners closed. Make sure you can see the filling through the middle.

These really are delicious cookies, whether you make them with poppy seed goo or other sweet filling of choice.

Pre-children, we never used a lot of milk in our house; Buzz has always been mildly lactose intolerant, so it was only used for the occasional recipe. Now, though, the two kids get plenty of milk every day (yes, I’ve fallen for the Dairy Council’s message that MILK BUILDS BONES). The local health-and-organic grocery store has milk in actual glass bottles from a organic, no-hormone Virginia dairy. You can return the bottles for a deposit (and should, since it’s a $2 deposit), and it’s just a seriously awesome way to buy milk. The bottles are just cool.

Unfortunately, the milk occasionally has a tendency to go off before the expiration date, far more than any other brand of milk I’ve ever bought. The store is always quite nice about it and exchanges for a fresh bottle with no questions asked, and it’s (kinda) on the way home so it isn’t extremely inconvenient. Tonight, we opened a bottle that allegedly had 3 days to go, and noticed it was sour… and Buzz decided, “Hey, people used to cook with this stuff, that would make it a Retro Recipe ingredient, right?”

Well… he’s right, but I’m not feeding it to the kids until he eats it with no ill effects.

See those chunks on the glass? That’s how you know it’s, uh, “good” for this recipe, originally from The Pioneer Cook Book.

Mrs. Ethington’s Old-Fashioned Muffins
2 cups uncooked oatmeal
1 1/2 cups sour milk
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted shortening
1 well-beaten egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

Pour sour milk over oatmeal; allow to stand a few hours or overnight. Combine sugar, shortening and egg; add to oatmeal mixture. Sift together remaining dry ingredients; blend. Bake in greased or paper-lined muffin tins at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes 18 muffins.

After soaking up sour milk overnight, the oats had become a very solid mass. It broke up without too much trouble when stirred into the other ingredients, but it was interesting getting it out of the bowl.

The muffins themselves were good — a little on the bland side, though, so use a whole 1 teaspoon of salt instead of the 1/2 the recipe calls for. They are certainly hearty, and probably good for you with all that oatmeal goodness.

I’ll give it 24 hours before I feel really comfortable stating that the sour milk wasn’t a bad idea, though. Buttermilk would give the same tang (which wasn’t really obvious in the end product), and unspoiled milk should taste just as good — why use the spoiled stuff when there are alternatives? (Unless you happen to write a weird blog chronicling your occasional attempts to poison your family, of course, in which case go nuts.)

Goulash, like bread pudding, is a recipe that we have tried many variations with and enjoy having regularly. At its best, it requires something like half a jar of paprika with plenty of meat and onions. One of our favorites came from the Ships of the Great Lakes Cookbook (via NPR’s Kitchen Sisters), although it does require shrinking — its original intent was to feed a shipload of hungry sailors, meaning you’ll have goulash for weeks if you make the full amount. This version is from a Monarch Cook Book, via the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook.

I love this cookbook cover, by the way. The product (iron range) prominently displayed, complete with a man jauntily waving his cap while standing on the oven door to demonstrate its durability. (Click the pic to see him larger, in his full mustachioed glory.)

Hungarian Gulasch
1-1/2 pounds onions, chopped
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp paprika [or many more depending on your preference]
1-1/2 pounds stew beef
1 cup canned tomatoes, diced or chunked
1 tsp vinegar [or more depending on your preference]
5 potatoes, diced
water
salt & pepper to taste

It’s really easy — first saute your onions in butter, then dump everything in a pot and let it simmer for ages. (The recipe claims 45 minutes is enough, but we usually give it a few hours.)

If you have a CrockPot, things are even simpler. Ours only recently broke (just stopped heating things one day), so we used the retro recipe as an excuse to buy a new CrockPot.

It seems I’m using the blog as an excuse for a lot of new kitchen appliance purchases. (Quick, somebody think of a recipe that will require a new fridge.)

See? I wasn’t kidding. Dump everything in the CrockPot and wait! It turns into a sweet, zesty beef stew, great for a chilly night when you want hearty and comforting food without much work.

We ended up using more paprika and vinegar than even the Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook suggested, and its measurements were a huge step up from the pinches of paprika in the original Monarch Cook Book; those 19th century Americans really couldn’t handle any spice.

Marie Antoinette is sadly best known for wondering why the starving masses didn’t eat cake (or brioche) if they were out of bread. In that spirit, I’ve attempted to make a cake recipe which originated from an era of privation, although not famine — World War II and the days of sugar rationing.

(At this point, I’m trying to picture Eleanor Roosevelt, the best approximation of Marie Antoinette at the time, saying something ignorant about people putting up with rationing. It’s not a very plausible picture, is it?)

Sugar rationing was never nearly as bad in the US as it was in Europe; however, there were limits on what you could get, and the housewife who wanted sweets for her family needed to be creative. To help them adapt, numerous companies encouraged them that they could make cakes anyway, without one or more of the critical ingredients (butter, eggs, sugar). One long pamphlet was put out by Rumford Baking Powder (brought to the internet by RecipeCurio.com), with a very 1940’s locked sugar can on its cover and many recipes inside.

A lot of its ingredients actually strike me as cheating — the sugar is replaced with corn syrup or (in the recipe I tried) honey, so they’re not really “sugar-free” in the modern sense. But the modern definition really depends on a culture with lots of diabetics who want to eat candy and cookies without eating sugar, not on a nation which must restrict its sugar usage so Hershey’s can make chocolate bars for the troops overseas.

Rumford Honey Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour
3 teaspoons Rumford Baking Powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup shortening [I used butter]
2 egg yolks
1 cup honey
1/2 cup milk
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift together flour, Rumford Baking Powder and salt. Cream shortening until light. Beat egg yolks until lemon colored, gradually adding 1/2 cup of the honey while beating. Add the egg-honey mixture slowly to the creamed shortening, creaming while adding. Add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk, mixing well after each addition. Beat egg whites until stiff; gradually beat in remaining 1/2 cup of honey until mixture stands in stiff peaks. Fold into cake batter until well-blended. Bake in 2 greased 9-inch layer cake pans in a moderate oven (375° F.) for 30 minutes. Cool and frost as desired.

They include the note, Any nutrition expert will tell you about honey’s qualifications as a pure natural sweetening–-and you’ll find out that it helps a cake stay fresh longer! Whatever. I’ve never had much trouble with cake sitting around until it gets stale. The one time we did end up with stale cake, I still got Buzz to eat it.

The step of folding in beaten egg whites means this wouldn’t be my first choice for making a cake from scratch. I prefer dump-n-mix recipes, that aren’t likely to be affected by a little too much stirring. But ohhhhh my, egg whites and honey are delicious together. I bet you could make little meringue cookies out of that.

The hardest part of this recipe was, sadly, due to my mixer. I expected the Totally Awesome Kitchen-Aid Mixer to never let me down, but the fact that I needed three bowls of various mixed things threw me for a loop — it only comes with one. I had to mix, transfer, clean, mix, transfer, clean, mix, transfer, clean… it was silly

These pictures are just to show you that, once again, I’ve made a baked good that strongly resembles Clayface. (But it didn’t destroy my mixer this time. HA!) The color and consistency are just uncanny.

One interesting thing is to contrast the two baked cake layers. The pan of the upper cake was greased with butter. The pan of the lower cake was greased with PAM. Notice the chunks missing from the PAM cake? Good old butter is the way to go… or maybe I just needed more PAM, who knows.

Cocoa whipped cream icing is fast to make, and a decent contrast to honey cake. Sprinkles are on top just because that’s what happens when you cook with a preschooler in the room. (We had bright pink macaroni and cheese for dinner one night, for example. These things happen.)

The flavor possibly would have been more like white-sugar cake if I’d used store-bought honey rather than some from the Farmer’s Market, which tends to be darker. But the only strongly honey bites were the first few; after that, it was not really noticeable. This would taste great with some nuts mixed in, or even turned into a fruitcake. It certainly doesn’t seem like sugar rationing would have been unbearable if the backup desserts were of this quality.