Salvation Army Whip Cream Cake with Lemon Butter Frosting

I just returned from a whirlwind 36-hour visit to Akron to celebrate my mother's 85th birthday.  While I have mixed feelings about my hometown (are there any good restaurants?), one thing that never disappoints are the fabulous estate sales held each weekend.

At a particularly interesting one (read: house packed with treasures) on Sunday, I discovered a c. 1960 cook book filled with the recipes of members of the Women's Auxiliary of The Salvation Army of Akron.  (The Salvation Army is not an army at all, but rather a Christian church.)

I was especially interested in the recipe for Whip Cream Cake, as I had recently purchased some fabulous and hard-to-find heavy cream that was not ultra-pasteurized.  This is a rich, almost yellow, cream that is a completely different (and much better) animal than the supermarket heavy cream.

For the frosting, I chose a recipe I've wanted to try for a while -- something called lemon butter, which is really lemon curd but with an easier method.

Old-fashioned whipped cream cakes use cream in place of butter.  As such, they are really easy to prepare.

To make the cake, whip the cream until it thickens and resembles whipped cream.

Add the rest of the ingredients and blend.

Pour into greased and floured eight-inch pans.

For the frosting, zest and juice a couple of lemons.

Place eggs, sugar, the lemon juice and zest, a dash of salt and butter in a saucepan and cook over low heat until thickened.

Better cooks may skip this step, but I always need to strain the lemon curd to remove the egg protein which "cooks" in the sauce.

Voila.  A gorgeous lemon curd.  Refrigerate until cold.

Place a small amount between the layers and the rest on top. Some fresh fruit is a nice finish.

Production notes:  I baked this for 19 minutes (but was using my Chambers oven, which doesn't have a reliable thermostat).  I followed the recipe exactly, but only sifted the flour once.  Grease and flour the pans for an easy release.

The Lemon Butter is a variation of lemon curd.  I followed this exactly, but needed to strain it at the end.  I also used butter instead of Oleo.

Lemon Queen's Cake

My friend Jay turned 50 last week and insisted on a surprise birthday party adventure.  His saintly partner Stephen more than rose to his demand  the task, orchestrating a chauffeured limousine journey through Manhattan and Brooklyn, stopping to pick up gift-bearing friends at locations meaningful to Jay. i.e, theaters, churches and restaurants. When the ginormous white car pulled up in front of my place, I had just finished frosting (badly, as you can see) a birthday cake.

I chose this vintage Lemon Queen's Cake recipe for its age (50+) and name, of course, but also because it had a coconut frosting and the recipe card had a "very good" notation on it.  This cake is "very good," but also complicated -- it has a cake component, a lemon curd filling and a frosting.

The first order of business is to make the lemon filling because it needs time to chill. For some reason, it never thickened properly.  (If you make this cake, I'd recommend using a more modern recipe for lemon curd from Martha Stewart, David Lebovitz or Rose Levy Berenbaum.)

The cake itself is a true white cake, i.e., it contains no egg yolks. (The four yolks are used in the lemon curd, typical of the 1940s waste-not want-not culture.) The method calls for mixing the batter, beating the egg whites separately and folding them in carefully.

You'll have to smooth out the batter with the back of a spoon or offset spatula before baking.

Let the layers cool completely before filling and frosting.

Using a serrated knife held horizontally, you can slice the "dome" off of each layer, making it easier to fill and stack them.

This cake does not travel well, especially in the back of a stretch limousine filled with champagne swilling passengers.  At the party, the photographer (yes, there was photographer who documented the entire day), called me aside to alert me to the condition of the cake below.  No worries -- I just took a couple of forks and re-positioned the layers.  It helps to have several glasses of wine before attempting this maneuver.

I thought it looked ok until Diane, another guest, said, I see you made a three-layer cake.  Well, friends, the number of layers should not be obvious -- the frosting should be smooth enough so as not to reveal the cake's structure.

In any case, the party caterers did an excellent job slicing this eight-inch cake to serve a lot of guests.

Below are some of the celebrants with the birthday boy.

Production notes: Grease and flour the pans (don't just grease them).  Choose another proven and tested lemon curd recipe.And always use butter, not shortening, for the butter cream. The frosting has a raw egg, so use a fresh farm one, not one from the supermarket.

Lemon Snow Cake

There are two kinds of people: those who will do back flips to "use up" leftovers in the refrigerator and those who will think about it for a moment, then surreptitiously toss out the item(s) in question, feeling guilt and relief simultaneously. Cookbook author Jane Brody, who clearly falls into the former category, once created a new bread recipe to use up the half-can of leftover tomato juice about to go bad in her refrigerator.  While I admire such resourcefulness, I too often toss rather than use.

However, when I found myself with a large bag of gorgeous Meyer lemons recently, I was determined to put them to good use.  And so, I made lemon snow cake from a vintage recipe card.

The "snow" of the name refers to the cake; there's nothing lemony about it -- it's a standard white cake (unless you choose lemon extract as the flavoring agent; I opted for vanilla). The "lemon" is contributed by the frosting and filling.  It's a delicious, old-fashioned cake, but it must be served in situ.  It cannot be moved much further than your kitchen counter, for the layers will start slip sliding away with too much motion.  Still, not such a bad thing to have a cake calling your name from such a close distance.

Make the cake layers first.  Cream the shortening (butter), sugar and eggs in a bowl.  Meantime, mix the dry ingredients and add then alternately with the milk, starting and ending with the dry ingredients.

Whip the egg whites until stiff but not dry.  Add a bit of cream of tartar to the whites to prevent overbeating.

Carefully fold the whites into the batter.

Spoon the batter into the greased and floured cake pans, using a spatula to spread the rather stiff batter to the edges.

Bake just 20 minutes (not the 30 called for in the recipe).

While the cake layers are baking, begin the filling by zesting and juicing the lemons.

Begin cooking the mixture in the top of a double boiler (or simply put a bowl on top of a saucepan filled with water).  Unlike modern-day lemon curds, this calls for cornstarch. If making this again, I might substitute a lemon curd from Martha Stewart for this more old-fashioned version.

After the filling has cooled in the refrigerator, spread it between layers and on top.

I found this recipe in a box I purchased last year on eBay.  The box had the Ladies Home Journal magazine logo on it, and was the perfect spot for a c. 1940s housewives to keep her cards in good order.