Today Ashleigh from Scratchy Mama decided to help me out and make one of the recipes from my Great-Grandmother’s Old Recipe box. Ashleigh blogs all about cooking from scratch, saving money and enjoying real food. Plus she even lives in Washington state like me! Make sure and check out her blog here and see her amazing recipes.
She chose the recipe card called “Fairy Cake”. When I read the title of that recipe it just reminded me of a light pretty cake covered in fresh whipping cream and sprinkles. I bet it was used for Birthdays or when a visitor came by. Doesn’t it sound kinda dreamy? Here is Ashleigh’s post with pictures of the process.
Like an angel food cake, but with a little more texture and flavor. Light and airy, but not so airy you still want your real dessert afterwards.
I made this with my nieces who love to cook and bake. The 9-year-old has such advanced knife skills that her parents let her do much of the chopping for dinners. She handles a chef’s knife like some adults I’ve seen!
This recipe is simple when it comes to ingredients: just eggs, flour, sugar and water. The key to a successful fairy cake is the method. Just as with the angel food cake, the egg whites must be beaten enough and folded in gently so they’re not deflated. The instructions stated low oven, which my brother-in-law (former baker) and I discussed as being around 300 or 325. I baked the cake at 310, but I think 325 would have been perfect.
The recipe called for beating the egg yolks and water for 5 minutes, adding the sugar and beating for 5 minutes, then adding the flour and beating for 5 minutes. In addition to that, the egg whites needed to be beaten before they are folded in. When I started thinking about this, I imagined beating by hand for 20 minutes and I wonder how big these women’s muscles were. That takes a lot of arm strength that I definitely don’t have! Thanks to my trusty mixer, my beating time when I added an ingredient was 2 minutes or so, cutting the time and the energy expended to make this take in half.
Although I wanted to stay true to the recipe, I had to add a pinch of salt. I don’t think I’ve ever baked anything without salt since it brings out all the other flavors. Besides that, I didn’t change anything.
HOW DID IT TASTE?
The cake tasted very similar to an angel food cake. Simple and light, yet richer (due to the egg yolks). I didn’t have berries or compote, but if I did I would have eaten it with the cake. If I had one complaint, it would be that the flavors weren’t complex…the egg flavor was a little too overpowering and the other flavor was just sugar.
Based on all these things, I’ve rewritten the recipe for the modern housewife—one who has a hand mixer or stand mixer and one who needs a little more guidance when it comes to oven temperature and baking method.
My son liked this cake the way it was, but I’m excited to make this cake again with the addition of the extracts and serve it with berries and cream. And I love being included in this tradition of baking from scratch!
Fairy Cake is perfect for a dessert!
- 4 eggs separated
- 1 teaspoon almond extract
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- Pinch salt
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Butter and flour 1 large or 2 smaller angel food cake pans.
- Using a stand mixer with the whisk attachment, beat egg yolks on high speed with 7 tablespoons cold water, vanilla and almond extracts for 2-3 minutes, or until light. Add sugar and mix on medium-high another 2 minutes. Add flour and mix on medium-high another 2 minutes. Set aside while you beat the egg whites (I transferred to a different bowl, scraped out my mixing bowl, and washed it).
- Beat egg whites until stiff peaks form, about 4 minutes.
- Fold egg whites into egg yolk mixture, a little at a time to be careful to not deflate the batter. Scrape into prepared pans. Bake for 40-50 minutes or until golden and the cake springs back just slightly when pressed. Cool upside down in pans on a wire rack (the cakes may fall out of the pan, which is ok).
- Cook to room temperature. Serve with berries and whipped cream.
I love doing this sort of thing with my grandma’s recipes. I always wonder over some of the words and descriptions. In this case, what do you suppose she meant by “dover beater”? Maybe an old rotary egg beater? That certainly would have made the job a little easier. Anyway, this one sounds yummy and I will give it a try.
Mary – she used a dover beater – found them on ebay –antique. Looks pretty cool.
http://www.ebay.com/bhp/dover-egg-beater
I vaguely remember using one of these “mixers” back when I was a kid. Actually, I went over to my friend’s house when we were in sixth grade to make a pink cake for our mothers for Mother’s Day. We had a lot of fun, as did her younger brothers and sisters, who all “helped” us mix the ingredients – we beat it so thoroughly that when we went to take it out of the pan it literally fell apart! (It still tasted GREAT!)
Your grandmother’s cake recipe sounds delicious, and I’ll be using the recipe for a lunch in two weeks, using the flavorings and adding some fresh fruit!
Sue Purdy Chapman
This looks yummy! Thanks for modernizing the recipe. Can’t wAit to try it out.
This sounds wonderful — I love your website and your outlook. You are inspiring! Also, did you mean “cool” in instruction #5?
can a person use a bundt pan? That is all I have?
Hey Karrie,
I am an American living in Australia! My husband is an Aussie and we have been married for 10 years this year. We moved to OZ in 2008 and although I love the Aussies….I miss my home in South Carolina! We live in a small country town west of Brisbane in Queensland, and I LOVE finding things like this on my computer to give me a taste of back home! Thanks for the hard work you obviously do and for the first of many recipes that I will try on these Aussie “guinea-pigs”! HA!
Most of them LOVE my Southern Cooking and are eager to try anything I put in front of them! I’ll keep in touch and Blessings to you and your lovely family! Cheers, Mina in QLD
the cakes looks beautiful and tasty!! Another thing that strikes me is that the handwriting on the recipe card looks amazingly similar to my mother’s! Must be the way cursive writing was taught back then. Cursive writing is barely taught at all nowadays. Thanks for posting!!
The handwriting on the recipe card looks just like my grandma’s. It made me smile to think of her.
Your modern adaptation looks wonderful and I think we’ll try it soon in honor of Grandma.
I’m looking at the way you butter & flour your pans and thinking that my frugality may be the reason that I don’t get that lovely golden color on my low-temperature cakes. I might just have to be a little more heavy-handed with the butter instead of using the bare minimum to make the surface shine and then polishing it all over until I can get a dusting of flour to cling to it. That’s just the most gorgeous color you got on that cake!
I love to use King Arthur Princess Flavoring to recipes for baked goods. It’s just that extra flavor that enhances a cake, etc. I’m going to try his recipe with only that addition, leaving out the extracts. I’m certain I’ll end up trying this over again many ways ! Hanks for sharing!