Today is my daughter’s 19th birthday and since she’s home from college for the weekend I wanted to bake her a birthday cake. She really loved the movie “The Lion King” and I wanted to find a Simba cake pan, but didn’t have any luck. I thought that would have been cute for a 19 year old. Maybe I’ll be able to find one for her 20th. If any of you know where I could locate one or if you have one sitting around collecting dust, please let me know and we can give it a new home.
The cake I made her is the Boston Favorite Cake on page 571, and I marbled it (marbled, is that a verb? If not, I just made it one.). The recipe suggested I use a Maple Frosting or a Creamy Chocolate Frosting. I went with the Chocolate which is on page 599. I used my Fannie Farmer Cookbook Thirteenth Edition; author, Marion Cunningham; publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., division of Random House; ISBN 0-394-56788-9. I don’t know why it’s called “Boston Favorite Cake”, there was not explanation, but I wish I knew. Maybe it’s a favorite cake of the Boston Red Sox.
Boston Favorite Cake
6 Tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, separated
1½ teaspoons vanilla
1 3/4 cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk
Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Butter and lightly flour two 8-inch cake pans.
Cream the butter until softened and slowly add the sugar, beating until light.
Add the egg yolks and vanilla and beat to blend well.
Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt onto a piece of wax paper.
Alternately blend the dry ingredients and the milk into the butter mixture in three stages.
Beat until smooth.
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry.
Stir a third of the egg whites into the cake batter and gently fold in the remaining.
Spoon into the cake pans.
Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a straw inserted in the center comes out dry.
Cool in pans for 5 minutes before turning out onto racks.
Fill and frost with Creamy Chocolate Frosting (p.599) or Maple Frosting (p.600)
Marble Cake. Divide the batter in half. Melt 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate in a bowl over simmering water and add it to half the batter. Fill the pans using large spoonfuls and alternating between the plain and the chocolate batters.
Comments & Reviews
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX!!! She will always have a place in our heart…our first “real” babysitter!
I hope she enjoyed her cake. It looks DELISH!!!
Thank you, Lorie! I’ll direct her to your comment. She told me she liked it, but at this point, she’s really liking any home-cooked food!
This is my favorite cake to make! I now make it with a few modifications for a gluten-free version. I laughed at your attempt at the frosting… indeed, I was up half the night the first go-round trying to thicken it, and believing either I was crazy or Fannie Farmer needed a new tester-editor. Now I skip the frosting and simply add plenty of chocolate chips to the batter before folding in the egg whites. What a good fortune to find your blog post! I had just lost my Fannie Farmer cookbook and couldn’t find this recipe. Thanks!
This is actually my 21-year-old son’s favorite frosting recipe. Thank you for posting it; his birthday is later this week and I can’t find my Fannie Farmer cookbook. It’s cooling now so that I can mail his birthday-cake-in-a-box kit. This frosting doesn’t have milk or cream in it, so it mails well. (I put the cake in a large plastic container, the frosting in a plastic bag, and tape a card and candles to the top of the container. I did this his freshman year, and he loved it, so now it’s a tradition.) I first tried this recipe when he was a nursing baby and allergic to dairy (so I couldn’t eat any) and I needed to make a birthday cake for his older brother.
It thickens eventually, but it takes much longer than 2-3 minutes to thicken.