Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!
It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.
Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:
Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.
How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?
It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.
"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.
And sure enough!
The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!
You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.
You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.
But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.
It is White Mountain Icing!
My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.
It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.
The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.
We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.
We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!
And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.
Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.
I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.
End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.
Ham. Is there anything better?
And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.
We will be doing this again!
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