[Sca-cooks] Favorite dessert?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Apr 3, 2008, at 9:19 PM, S CLEMENGER wrote:
> Cailte, scotch only qualifies as engine cleaner....

I was taught when I was a wee one never to strike a lady nor the daft,  
so I'll let that pass... but I'll also point out that there's a very  
broad range of products known as Scotch. It's on a par with condemning  
all fruit when you don't like unripe gooseberries.

> And what is "cream cake?"
> --Maire

I can't speak for this particular usage, but one possibility is to  
identify it as a cake leavened with neither egg foam (i.e. sponge  
cake) nor yeast, but made by starting out by creaming together butter  
and sugar, then adding eggs and flour (which may or may not have  
additional chemical leavening added to it). In practice, anything from  
pound cake to the standard American-type yellow layer cake type  
entity, or its chocolate or other-flavored counterpart.

Incidentally, while all this discussion of favorite desserts has been  
going on,  I've had occasion to note that it is apparently no longer  
possible to go to a bakery anywhere in the civilized world and  
purchase an ordinary two-or-three-layer cream cake with buttercream  
frosting made with actual butter -- you know, the old, archetypal  
1950's "birthday cake", that isn't an obscene mound of fake  
buttercream with a few scraps of cake hidden underneath gluey pseudo- 
fruit jellies, more oily, sugary-gritty Twinkie-filling buttercream,  
and gum paste that will dissolve your teeth at 30 paces. That, you can  
buy, or you can buy a box of cake mix and a can of chemical frosting,  
or you can make it yourself from scratch, but apparently no one feels  
the return on the investment of time and money is worth it anymore.

But that, especially after having lost my Mom last autumn, is the  
dessert ever over the horizon, that I have been craving: for me, it  
would be a two-layer yellow cake made with about eight eggs, in my  
mother's twelve-inches-across by two-inches-deep cake pans that were  
really aluminum beer serving trays, with either chocolate buttercream  
(eggless) or, even better, chocolate cream-cheese frosting, with  
either jam or buttercream in between the layers. Traditionally served  
in a horse-choking wedge that probably weighed two pounds and hung  
slightly over the edges of a small dessert-plate ;-) Some people  
preferred the cake itself to be chocolate, and that was good, too, but  
to me it was gilding the lily.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter