A "Great Cake" for the Holidays!
We are reviving this cake recipe (posted previously) as a great addition to your festive holiday table. It's a show-stopper of a cake, large, rich (but not overly sweet), and coated in an avalanche of white frosting. Such fancy cakes with white icing were served at formal dinners and elegant supper parties favored by nineteenth-century urban elites in America's bustling cities.
Election Cake is an adaptation of the English "Great Cake," traditionally made with flour, yeast, sugar, spices, butter, cream, wine, and raisins or currants. The "twelve or twenty loaves" made for election-week festivities by Hartford women in the early 1800s were adapted from the huge single cakes made in England in earlier days. Anywhere from a peck (fourteen pounds) to half a bushel (twenty-eight pounds) of flour had been mixed into those. Great cakes indeed!
While the women of Hartford's mansion houses divided these massive productions into multiple loaves, the famed nineteenth-century abolitionist and writer (who also authored a cookbook), Lydia Maria Child, calls her recipe an "old fashioned" Election Cake. She reduces the flour to a mere four pounds, enough for a couple of loaves. Even this amount is large by modern standards. So we've reduced the quantities to make one large and beautiful cake. We think it's just the thing for a sweet holiday centerpiece!
The Ingredients—Cake
(makes 1 cake)
2 cups whole milk
1 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
3 packets active dry yeast
7¼ cups all-purpose flour
12 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1¼ cups raisins
The Ingredients—Frosting
Child's recipe doesn't call for frosting, but we know that the Election Cakes of her day were often frosted. A Connecticut man, John Howard Renfield, lovingly recalled the "delicate frostings of white of egg and sugar" that coated the Election Cakes of his early nineteenth-century childhood. The cake we were making was going to be displayed as well as eaten, and we thought frosting would make it look, as well as taste, even better.
1 cup sugar
1⅓ cup water
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar (or ½ teaspoon light corn syrup)
dash of salt
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla
How We Made It
We scalded the milk, poured it into a mixing bowl, and added to it the salt and ¼ cup of the sugar. After this mixture had cooled to lukewarm, we stirred in the yeast.
As soon as the yeast activated, we mixed in 6 cups of the flour, then kneaded this preliminary dough for 2 minutes in our stand mixer.
We creamed the remaining sugar with the butter, then added the eggs.
After mixing the raisins with the remaining flour, we resorted once again to our nifty stand mixer to merge the three components we now had—dough, sugar/butter/egg, and flour/raisins—into one.
We returned our fully-assembled Election Cake dough to the original mixing bowl and left it to rise for 2 – 2¼ hours, or until doubled in bulk.
We now preheated the oven to 375º F. We put the dough into a baking pan and let it rise for another 20 minutes.
It was ready for the oven, where it baked for 10 minutes at 375ºF, then for 80 minutes at 350ºF. When it was done to a lovely golden brown, we cooled it on a rack for 10 minutes, then removed it from the pan and cooled it completely, about 30 minutes longer.
While it was cooling we made the frosting.
First, we whisked the egg whites in our stand mixer (you can use a hand-held mixer just as well) until soft peaks formed.
Then we put the sugar, water, cream of tartar, and salt in a non-aluminum (non-reactive) saucepan and stirred until the sugar was melted. We allowed the syrup to boil for 2 minutes, until it reached 240°F on our candy thermometer. (Be careful, this is a very hot liquid!)
We then poured the hot syrup in a slow, steady stream while beating the egg whites on high speed. (Again be very careful with the hot syrup!) (This procedure brought the mixture to 160°F, the temperature at which the salmonella bacteria are killed. Check your frosting with a thermometer to be sure. If very young children, older or immune-compromised people will be eating the frosting, it is even safer either to make a 7-minute frosting that reaches 160°F or to use pasteurized egg whites.)
We added the vanilla and continued beating until soft peaks formed. As the cake was now sufficiently cooled, we applied to it a generous, swirly layer of our "delicate frosting of white of egg and sugar."
Lydia Maria Child's recipe, with an icing inspired by John Howard Renfield's recollections, produces a glorious, old-fashioned cake that's perfect for a modern holiday table.
Child's original recipe, with commentary, can be found in our book, Northern Hospitality, p. 385.