Every family, I think, has recipes that only one or two members make. I'm not sure why, and I don't know how the people get picked to be the annointed cookers...I imagine there are secret handshakes and strange passwords involved. Then again, maybe not.
In Jason's family, the recipe is for a cake. It's really a simple cake...yellow cake with vanilla buttercream icing with melted chocolate poured on top. Jason's Grandmother called it a drip-dry cake. I'm not really sure if it was her invention or not, but we'll just give her the credit.
I've been around Jason's family for 22 years, and let me tell you, in those early years, having a drip-dry cake at a family dinner was an event. It didn't matter how many desserts were on the table, just about everyone asked for a piece of that cake first.
As Gram got older, she stopped baking. The cake wasn't made often after that. Then, one of Jason's Aunts moved back into town, and she made the cakes for every occasion. We were drowning in drip-drys (say that five times fast). And then, like Gram, she stopped baking. Alzheimer's stole her from us, bit by bit.
Last week, I was asked (for the first time ever) to make a drip-dry cake by Jason's mother. I was freaking out. Fah-REAKING. OUT. Not because I didn't think I could do it; it is a simple cake, after all. No, I was competing against ghosts and memories, and that's never fun.
So, I turned to my old friend with alllllll the answers. Google. There was no way I was taking a shortcut and using a boxed mix. So I searched...and searched...and searched for a recipe for plain yellow cake and kick-ass buttercream icing. (Did I ever mention how competitive I am? Yeah.. I am. If I was being thrown under the bus by making this cake, I wasn't going down without a fight.)
Recipes and ingredients in hand, I broke the cardinal rule of cooking: NEVER, EVER make a new recipe for the first time for an event. I mixed up the batter, and it was awesome. (Yes, I eat raw cake batter...and raw cookie dough. It hasn't killed me yet.) I poured my perfect batter into my cake pans, and I popped them in the oven.
After about 10 minutes, the house was filled with the smell of cake, which I thought was odd, since the cake had to cook 30 minutes. At about 15 minutes in, I smelled BURNT cake. ACK! So, I open the oven, and my perfect cake batter is spilling out of my cake pans. So, I do what any normal person would do. I closed the oven door and hoped for the best. After 30 minutes, the timer goes off. I open the oven door, and I see two perfectly cooked cakes...and an oven full of black smoke.
I let the cakes cool, thinking that just maybe they would taste ok. I opened all the windows and turned on the fans to clear out the kitchen of smoke (I was also more than a bit alarmed that all that smoke did NOT set off my smoke detectors). I broke off a piece of the cake to taste it, and it seemed ok. I wrapped up the cakes, and let them sit over night.
The next morning, the cakes still looked perfect under the wrappers. I peeled back the Saran wrap, and I was hit by the smell of smoke. DAMN! OK, maybe I was over-reacting. I asked one of my boy children (mistake #1) if he smelled smoke. Nope. Mistake #2: I believed him. I frosted the cake, and the more I pressed down on the cake applying icing, the more smoke I smelled. DOUBLE DAMN!
I kept frosting hoping I was just being hyper-sensitive (it's been known to happen). Nope...even frosted, I could smell smoke. Alrighty then. There was no way I could serve that. So, I made another one (after I scraped out the oven, of course).
I used bigger pans...SQUARE pans, not the normally used round pan. Again, the batter was perfect. I pulled the cooked cake out of the oven and smelled it. It smelled like....cake. Oh, thank gawd. First hurdle cleared.
At this point, I was absolutely convinced that something would happen, and my frosting would not be as good as the previous day's version. I measured, mixed and tasted. It was totally kick-ass. In fact, it was better than the previous batch. (How, I have no clue. I took it as a gift from the baking gods after my disasters the day before.)
It turned out great. I rocked it. Yup, I did. All the stress, all the smoke, all the butter...it was all worth it.
Oh, and if you tackle a family recipe, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend reading your recipe 4 or 5 times before you start cooking. Otherwise, you may read "8 inch square pan OR 9 inch round pan" as "8 inch round pan."
Just sayin'.
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