Wednesday, March 26, 2008

book club

I don't normally post pictures of food, but since this is probably the prettiest cake I've ever made, I thought I'd document it. :)
It was my turn to host book club this month, and we were reading To Kill A Mockingbird. (I wasn't that enthused about a re-read, but it was much better than I had remembered). Miss Maudie's Lane Cake kept coming up in the book, so I toyed with the idea of trying to make it for our dessert. My friend Becky egged me on, so I went on an old-fashioned cake adventure. It was pretty fun. I'd never made a filling like that or made a seven-minute frosting. In some strange sense it was fun to make and eat something from history. Mrs. Lane won a prize for this cake and published it in a cookbook in 1898. It became a big hit in Alabama and the nation afterward, although I'd never eaten it before. The furor must have subsided in the last century.
I was expecting it to be too sweet and heavy after all that work, but it was really good!


3 comments:

SMS said...

I am so impressed!!! I have yet to make a cake that looks anything close to that!!! Stunning. If you are ever back in NC and feel like entering baked goods in the fair I betcha that would take the blue ribbon :)

Robert J. Nash said...

Even though it looks like a lot of work I would love the recipe...if you are sharing it!
Love, Katie

Terri said...

Katie - the recipe for a Lane cake is all over the internet...I just used one from www.recipezaar.com, and then frosted it with a seven-minute frosting (which is also really easy to find, I think). It is a lot of work, but I made the cake and the filling one day, and assembled it and made the frosting the next. It was kinda fun!