My grandmother, mother’s mother, was famous in the large circle of her friends and relatives for her cakes. Cakes that were sheer perfection, a hard-to-come-by luxury that made one forget, I suppose, about the meagerness of one’s world, about supermarkets, laundry, quarrelsome neighbors, broken water pipes, small children unwilling to do homework, grown-up children with no apartment to start their own life, about dachas with potato fields that will soon need tilling, about the lousy weather, and the unfulfilled dreams of one’s youth. I’m only guessing, of course, that my grandmother’s cakes were a delicious nepenthe for her guests. But there is no doubt, that I have decades to cross, before I could possess a fraction of her undisputed mastery. Especially because it is such a challenge, I continue to bake. And this weekend my experiment was quite successful (in cases when it’s not, ravenous programmers at work are the sure solution for assimilating something sweet).
zest of one lemon
1. Beat the whites with the cream of tartar until there are hard peaks. You can do this with a hand whisk, but you will need the fanatical determination of Julia Child. Or, you can use a whisk attachment on a mixer. The cream of tartar helps to stabilize the egg whites, making them a bit more reliable.
2. Mix juice, oil, lemon juice and egg yokes. Pour in the flour mixture and mix with a mixer until homogeneous. Add chopped pears and poppy seeds and mix with a spoon.
3. Pour the dough into the egg whites, and fold in with a spatula until incorporated. Pour this into a non-stick, ungreased (numerous recipes claim this to be important for this type of batter, but I have not checked) cake pan with a removable bottom. Sprinkle with poppy seeds and place into the oven.
Notes:
This is essentially a chiffon cake batter with a few additions to make it interesting without frosting. For this cake, I simplified the method from Peterson’s “Baking”
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