Thoughts on the Lady Baltimore Cake

When I was an infant, the cookbook most frequently consulted in our house was an old edition of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. It was full of exotic delights. For example, the recipe for Spanish Rice was accompanied by a stylized drawing of a senorita in a mantilla. One of the recipes that caught my imagination was the Lady Baltimore Cake. I can't remember why I was so captivated. Was there a photo? Was there a blurb that made it sound especially enticing? Was it because it was a *gasp* three layer cake? That would have rocked my eight-year-old world because all the cakes I knew only had two layers. (Little did I know at the time that the rest of America had already moved on to cake mixes. Frosting came in mixes too back then, but shortly evolved into tubs of ready-made frosting when the concept of adding your own water became too much for the American cook of the 1970s).



We never made a Lady Baltimore Cake, but then a recipe for one appeared in this...

...so I am clearly fated to give it a try.  And so I did.



Isn't it pretty?  Those are sugared pecans and now I know how to make sweet and salty nuts.

Do you know what's in a Lady Baltimore Cake?

Well, let's break it down.  There are three layers of white cake.  The icing is a stabilized meringue.  The filling is a mixture of candied fruit and chopped nuts.  I think I put golden raisins, dried tart cherries, and dried pineapple in mine.  It is decorated with pecans coated in sugar.  There.  Now you have all the information you need to answer the question correctly.  What is in a Lady Baltimore Cake?

When you break it all down, Lady Baltimore Cake is pretty much egg whites and sugar and not much else. The first bite is delicious.  The second bite is nauseating.  It is not a dish fit for children, which is ironic since only children could appreciate all the icksweet.  We had a piece and decided that the experiment was a success and I took the remainder in to work to foist off on my co-workers.  However, someone else had already put out sweets so I saved it for the afternoon and by that time, it had collapsed.  I took it back home and threw it away.

And now I have made a Lady Baltimore Cake and I never need to do that again.


I also made these:

These are toffee bars with chocolate and pecans.  They're tasty enough, but I don't see them becoming part of my regular repertoire.  The whole chocolate-coating-and-sprinkling-of-nuts thing is a pain in the ass.  Also, they require Heath Toffee Bits.  God knows what in toffee bits, but you can't get them at either of the decent grocery stores; they're only available at the crap stores, and I'm such a food snob that it pains me to go in there (even though that's also the only place I can get decent almond paste and palatable diet root beer).

So.  2008.  Oh yeah!  I tried the madeleines and they came out better than the other recipes I tried (thank God Julia is dead because I wouldn't want to hurt her feelings).  That one's a keeper.  The only left is the pound cake.  I think I may have made it before, but maybe not, and well, there's a damn lot of cake around here right now so I haven't the heart.  Maybe next week.



This year, Mr. D vetoed my buche de noel.  I've kept my mouth shut about that so far, but I can't promise not to punish him for it later.  He said it was "too heavy."  Yeah.  He wants half a cow and a bushel of potatoes baked in gloppy white sauce but not a buche de noel because it's too heavy.  Bastard.  So instead, I made a peppermint cake, as he requested.

Too pink and too much peppermint.  The cake is good though, once you scrape off most of the frosting.

And we had the famous candied fruit slices.  Green cherries only this year.  It's kind of a long story, but I messed up the first ones and had to hunt through Northern Virginia on December 23 to find more cherries so I could make more and so Mr. D could have his goddamned favorite cookies and there were only green ones left.  The things I do to make him happy.....

And airplane cookies, of course, extra blue just like he likes them.  (And a few dinosaurs, lighthouses, dolphins, and rabbits for me, and some chocolate snowflakes.)

And the very special almond-ginger biscotti.

And some other stuff that didn't get its picture taken.  And I am tried.  I had cheese and crackers for lunch and it felt like a burden to go to the effort of unwrapping the cheese.

I'm not sure what happens next.  I'll probably save the 2009 and 2010 editions for next fall.  I may some other plan up my sleeve to take me through the next few months, but I haven't decided yet.