Mixed Results

When we left off on Wednesday, I was debating what to do about the whole lard issue. Then my friend Anna sent me a message reminding me that there is indeed a place in New York where real, non-hydrogenated, must be refrigerated lard can be found. Schaller & Weber, of course! This is a German grocery located on the Upper East Side. Being a West-sider now, I usually only go to the East Side when museums are involved, but a trip to Schaller & Weber is worth it, even without the lard. Word to the wise, however, do not go there if you are hungry! The mountains of German chocolate scream at you from the shelves and it takes incredible willpower not to scoop it all into a basket and run for the check out. I managed to escape with two pounds of lard and one bar of Milka. Then it was back to the West Side on the cross town bus at rush hour, a trip into Zabar's to buy cake pans, and finally a stop into Fairway to buy cocoa for the cake. As I was going into Fairway I gave my Mom a call, because when reading the Devil's Food Cake recipe earlier in the day, I noticed that what I first thought was 3/4 cups of cocoa was actually written 3-4 cups... I thumbed through the other recipes, and my anonymous author was always very consistent, writing 3/4 with a slash, not a dash. And there are other of her recipes that call for 2-3 cups of sugar and it's clear that she means 2 to 3 cups. Now, I'm no great cook, as I said before, but 3 to 4 cups of cocoa? That seemed like a lot for one cake. Especially considering that it only called for 1 1/2 cups of sugar. I've made brownies from scratch with cocoa and it takes a lot of sugar to sweeten that stuff up! Which is why I called my mom, and she nearly fell on the floor laughing to think of putting 3 to 4 cups of cocoa in one cake, and so with most of the clientele in Fairway wondering what was so funny (my Mom's laughter is contagious, so I was wiping tears from my eyes once I found the aisle with the cocoa) the decision was made to go with 3/4 cup and hope for the best.

This morning everything was ready and it was time to bake. During a last minute read-through, I realized the recipe also called for sour milk, so a quick phone chain from my Mom to my Aunt Delores confirmed that adding a bit of vinegar to whole milk would do the trick. Mixing the ingredients was pretty straightforward - even my son Ben got into it, as you see in the photo, mostly because this recipe involved chocolate and the promise of licking the fork and/or bowl once the cake was in the oven. Two of the rather vague instructions, including "bake in layers" and "bake in a hot oven" had been interpreted before we began, and so we baked the cake in two pans and set the oven at 375, and all went well. The cake smelled good, looked good and took exactly 21 minutes to bake. And then we made the frosting...

Because we had two egg whites left over from the cake, we searched through our box and found a recipe for "Star Icing", which required two egg whites and seemed to fit the bill nicely. The ingredients were simple and it should have taken only about 15 minutes to make, but after 40 minutes the icing was still as thin as soup, and spreading it on the cake was out of the question. So I added cornstarch. LOTS of cornstarch. Then I re-heated it. Stirred it for a few more minutes. Got completely exasperated and put it in the freezer, and after 5 minutes of deep chill, it had thickened enough to keep some of it on top of the cake rather than all pooling at the sides (although from the picture you can see that there was still a substantial amount of pooling). I have no idea what went wrong. The recipe called for the ingredients to be stirred over boiling water (like in a double boiler), and as far as I can tell, I did everything right. So in the hopes that someone else can figure this out, the Star Icing recipe is written as follows:

Star Icing
Put 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1/8 tsp. salt, 2 unbeaten egg whites to cook over boiling water. Beat constantly 7 minutes while icing is cooking. Remove from hot water. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until thick enough to spread. Frost cake.

I'd love to know if anyone can do this and have it thicken enough to spread. If you can, please comment and let me know the trick! Mine, without the cornstarch, was definitely not a spread but a pour.

Despite the troubles with the icing, Maya and I liked the taste of it better than the cake. I'm not much of a cake person, and this one was a bit dry for my taste, and Maya's as well. Ben loved it, however, (it was chocolate, after all) and it got a good review this afternoon from our friends who we forced to try it. If we could get the icing right, I'd make it again and use sour cream instead of sour milk...

But before that, there is a banana cream pie in our future!