Conquering the White House Cook Book’s Huckleberry Cake
When I left you in the February 1st post, I had made the Huckleberry Cake from The White House Cook Book by Fanny Lemira Gillette and Hugo Ziemann. Or attempted to make it, anyway. You can read more about that in that post, but the very short recap is that it had too much sugar, the amount of flour was an unknown – I initially guessed 2 cups – and the cake fell apart when I tried to remove it from the pan.
For the second test, I cut the sugar in half because I was convinced that was the biggest problem with Gillette’s recipe, aside from not stating the amount of flour. I was right. The cake stayed together and was adequately sweet. The taste was good, and, of course, we ate it. But it still needed one more round of testing, mostly because I felt it needed a bit of salt. I know the original recipe doesn’t call for salt, but at this point I was past having any faith in the original recipe.
I also decided to go ahead and use the huckleberries in this test, since I was fairly certain the cake would work, even if it wasn’t the final iteration. The recipe calls for one quart of huckleberries, which is a lot of huckleberries. I wanted to be conservative with my expensive huckleberries and used 1½ cups. Any more than that is entirely too much for this amount of batter. It would be huckleberries with a bit of cake in between them. It would also be a soggy mess.