Wednesday, January 18, 2006
You will need a 9" bundt-style tube pan (I used a tinned French pan, known to Maida Heatter fans as a "swirl pan"; this may seem like effete esoterica, but trust me, it makes a big difference in the outcome of your crumbs); butter and flour for the pan; 1 stick (4 oz.) unsalted butter, softened; 1 cup (7 oz.) granulated sugar; 3 large eggs; 1 cup (4 oz.) all-purpose flour; ½ tsp. baking powder, ½ teaspoon cinnamon; ½ teaspoon nutmeg; a pinch of salt; 1 jigger (2 fl. oz. or 4 tbsp.) brandy, rum or whiskey (I used a fragrant, sublime dark rum that a dear friend brought me back from Belize); 2 cups (approximately ¾ pound) golden raisins and 2 cups (a bit over ½ pound) whole pecan halves. No, "whole pecan halves" is not a contradiction in terms.
1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4) and set a rack to the middle of the oven. Butter and flour your pan.
2. Beat butter and sugar together until mixture is white and fluffy. This is what is known as "creaming" the butter and sugar, which, to hear the various editorial foodweasels tell it, is a term too intimidating for beginning cooks and bakers to learn, so we'd best not be putting it in our recipes, "Dredging" and "folding" are suspect, too. But I digress.
3. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat until incorporated. Stop to scrape down the bowl if you need to.
4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Most recipes will tell you to sift them together, and while sifting is good for aerating ingredients, I find that I have better luck blending them evenly with a whisk. A fork works well, too; just be sure to blend them for at least 30 seconds, so they're well-mixed.
5. Add the dry ingredients to the liquid in three increments; again, scrape the bowl sides as you need to. Add the brandy (or rum or whisky) and stir to combine.
6. By hand, stir in the pecans and the raisins. It will look as if you have far too many raisins and nuts, and not enough batter in which to suspend them, but I promise, if you are gentle, thorough and patient, you will have everything blended together evenly.
7. Pour the batter into the tube pan, tilt gently from side to side to be sure that you have an even distribution of batter on all sides of the pan, and send it to the oven.
8. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Check it after an hour, though; some ovens run hotter than others, and you don't want to burn your cake, which will make the kitchen smell like Heaven made manifest. If it looks done and is firm to the touch after an hour, but you still hear a faint "crackling" noise in the batter, send it back to the oven for five more minutes. If the cake is quiet, it's done.
9. Let the cake sit for ten minutes, then turn it out onto a cooling rack.
10. When you notice that it's not moving, run a knife around the edges of the cake, as well as the tube, and try again.
11. When it still doesn't move, remove the cooling rack and try inverting the cake again, this time giving the tube a gentle rap upon the table.
12. Stare mutely as only 1/3 of the cake falls from the pan. Check the pan again. Note that 2/3 of the cake is still in there.
13. Repeat steps 10 and 11 until the urge to sob uncontrollably passes.
14. Dig remainder of cake out of pan with spoon. Note how some of the cake releases in large, cakelike pieces, while the rest of it falls into moist, rum-scented crumbs.
15. Moosh the crumbs together into a cairn and take your pan to the sink. Reflect on the fact that this little French tinware pan is not like your Nordicware, nor even like its larger sibling French tinware pan, with the larger, easy-to-grease-and-flour swirls. This is a pan that requires lavish buttering and coating with breadcrumbs, not flour. You knew this, you knew from the beginning that you needed breadcrumbs, but no, you decided to take a shortcut. For shame, Doc.
16. Grab yourself a plate, hack off a bit of the mooshed cake and taste it. Know that even though it's not what you were looking for, you are still in the presence of a luscious, fragrant cake. Have I mentioned what good rum will do to pecans and raisins and butter cake? Would you like me to mention it again?
17. Try it again, this time with a properly greased pan (or with a less finicky one). When the cake drops beautifully and wholly from the pan, you will have made Rita (Mrs. Thomas Hart) Benton's Pecan Cake, as found in How America Eats by Clementine Paddleford. It will be a vision when you cut a slice of it, all those pecans and raisins bumping up happily against each other, and if you store the cake in an airtight tin and regularly dose it up with more rum, it will last you for a good long while.
A bittersweet tale, and not an unfamiliar one to yrs truly. I have shed quite a few tears over similar piles of cake crumbs. The cake sounds delicious, though, and I am having a love affair with my 3 first ever bundt pans at the moment. Coincidentally, I purchased today, at the used book store, my first ever Maida H. cookbook- her 1st one, the “Desserts” book.
Do you think that if I used a nordicware type bundt pan, I could forgo the breadcrumbs for flour? Truth be told, I have never dusted a pan with breadcrumbs in my life, and I’m not sure I know what sort of breadcrumbs to use. Not those nasty packaged ones that do taste like dust? But aren’t homemade ones, or panko, or whatever, too big to “dust” with? How can I have lived and cooked for so many years without making a Maida H recipe, or dusting a pan with breadcrumbs?
I have repeated steps 10-14 a few times myself. In the hope that this will make you feel better, I’ll confess that the most recent time I found myself staring at the broken middle of something I’d baked was not a tube cake, but a cornbread. In a well-buttered, square baking pan. I was stunned.
Lindy, you are in for a treat with any of Ms. Heatter’s books. I kept the first I bought (chocolate desserts) on my bedside table for weeks, and read myself into cocoa-dusted dreams each night.
AAhhh...Missy B, you’re really hitting your stride these days. Before I could even post a hint disguised as a comment on your glorious “Listening to Pecans” post, a comment that would somehow betray my longing to know the secret of Mrs. Thomas Hart Benton’s boozy pecan cake as confided to Clementine Paddleford, well, here it is. Thank you. And it sounds like something I would happily eat in neat slices or as a pile of crumbs, whether laughing maniacally or sobbing uncontrollably. True confession: I don’t even own a bundt pan. I do have a lovely glass kugelhopf mold in which I have made every bundt-style recipe I’ve ever tried. Certainly not as gorgeous as a chrysanthemum bundt pan, which I will someday get up the nerve to buy and try, but it does turn out a serviceable cake.
Regularly dose me up with rum and cakes like this and I won’t just last a long time, I’ll be yours forever.
Wow, that sounds good. I was going to say that it’s very similar to Joy of Cooking’s white fruit cake, which even people who hate fruit cake love, but if memory serves, they use the same amount of fruits and nuts for a larger amount of batter. Also, that recipe is perhaps not as nicely spiced as yours, and I find that with the JoC recipe, the dried fruit bits that are on the surface burn slightly, though it is easy enough to pick off the burned bits. I believe that I will attempt your recipe with a mixture of golden raisins, chopped dried apricots, pecans, and the black walnuts that I just scored from ebay after reading your pecan pie post and for which I am now waiting with considerable impatience, though the auction was only completed yesterday.
I much prefer a tubular pan as you use here, but for those poor unfortunate souls who don’t collect them from yard sales, I might mention that you could almost certainly make the cake in two loaf pans, though you would likely have to adjust the baking time.
Oh, yum. I’m with ‘mouse. Yours forever. Whether you want me or not!
LOL! I am reminded of a great punchline to a similar disaster story by Garrison Keillor: “She served it up in bowls.” We have served up a lot of unlikely things in bowls around here (after the sobbing passed). Or, as my Aunt Louie (the Pecan Pie Guru of Alabama) wrote on a recipe card for something similar, “If it flops, chew it up with sips of coffee.”
Thanks for a reassuring laugh...and a reminder of why I always always use breadcrumbs (just the ‘unflavored’ supermarket kind--if there’s too many on the cake later, you can brush ‘em off)
at first read, i thought your sublime dark rum had brought your friend back from Belize.
my kaiser pan has kept my crumbs delightfully crumby. it’ll work, won’t it?
10. When you notice that it’s not moving, run a knife around the edges of the cake, as well as the tube, and try again.
If it is still doing a John Travolta impersonation in the middle of the dance floor, leave it alone and come back in 15 minutes.
15. Moosh the crumbs together into a cairn and take your pan to the sink.
It is absolutely not advised to moosh your crumbs in an English bull, nearly guaranteed the results will be unpleasant, if not completely drooly.
Like I told my Mom after a similar result with an angel food cake...If all else fails, make a trifle out of it....
Still chuckling…
You make me so hungry. Is there anything more glorious than that recipe? I think not!
nmiguy
Guess what me and TheKid are making this weekend!
Hey there, I just tagged you for a meme! I hope that’s ok ... if you don’t feel like doing it, don’t worry about it. They’re kind of fun though, as long as like 200 people don’t send them to you at once. 
Kristen
I shouldn’t admit to this, not at all, but once, in an hysteric of self-confident ambition, I thought to make an angel food cake. I realize that for you such a thing shouldn’t seem ambitious. Butr consider that it was my first time. Consider that, while of legal age for all sorts of sinning, for angel food making 22 is possibly too tender, too mild. It was meant to be a birthday cake for my then girlfriend.
It was not eaten. It was celebrated in a sort of grim, smirking, frowning, now wondering just how just how how could this have happened sort of way. So, you see, it, that “cake” was not without some virtue. None of that some however, was remotely edible. I mean this cake--I mean this cake was, in fact, not. I had no tube or bundts or swirly french tins or flirting flangenkanckles. I did have a pyrex 9 x 13 and so that was what I used. I don’t know what went wrong. I have not tried to make such a cake again. I don’t even like that sort of cake. That girlfriend is long gone and married away. The memory, the rubbery, solid, petrified jello, the off-yellow mackerel’s gall stone that wasn’t a cake--that memory survives. And so I am not impressed by your tragedy. In fact my cake baking skills are such that I honestly read, and read again and puzzled and pondered what mystery was this moving of the cake. Three four steps beyond before I realized something was wrong and wondering that this was an awful lot of bother for making breadcrumbs. Yes I would count myself highly skilled, and blessed, indeed if I had a third here and two-thirds there of broken but *edible* cake shrapnel. Consider.
Once I realized what was going on I thought this was fucking hilarious though.
Yum… that’s what I would have done, too… scoop it onto a plate and enjoy it anyway.
Stupid pan.
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A bittersweet tale, and not an unfamiliar one to yrs truly. I have shed quite a few tears over similar piles of cake crumbs. The cake sounds delicious, though, and I am having a love affair with my 3 first ever bundt pans at the moment. Coincidentally, I purchased today, at the used book store, my first ever Maida H. cookbook- her 1st one, the “Desserts” book.
Do you think that if I used a nordicware type bundt pan, I could forgo the breadcrumbs for flour? Truth be told, I have never dusted a pan with breadcrumbs in my life, and I’m not sure I know what sort of breadcrumbs to use. Not those nasty packaged ones that do taste like dust? But aren’t homemade ones, or panko, or whatever, too big to “dust” with? How can I have lived and cooked for so many years without making a Maida H recipe, or dusting a pan with breadcrumbs?