Another favorite pinning topic on Pinterest is recipes. 1000's and 1000's of recipes. And I have almost 400 pinned myself (yikes!). June brings a birthday at our house, so what better reason to make a homemade cake! I love Italian Creme Cake, and found a recipe posted to Pinterest. When I went to the link, I was estatic to find it on the Pioneer Women's website! I loveeeee the Pioneer Women, Ree Drumond. I began following her at the beginning of the year when her new show started on The Food Network. It was fun to realize many of my co-workers enjoy her, too! We have great conversations at lunch about the things she makes.
In the spring, I was so glad to discover she would be coming to my town for a book signing! I arranged for "tickets" for several of us to go see her. I say "tickets" because they were free. They were really just to hold us a sit in the auditorium for her presentation. We arrived early and waited about an hour so we had good seats, which we did. She did a small presentation which was funny and enjoyable. We laughed as she told us a little more about herself and her life. We had a bit of a wait to get our cookbooks signed, but it really wasn't bad when you considered how many were there and that many brought/purchased multiple books to be signed. She really is gracious and I think very genuine.
She was very accomodating to everyone there, including us. She had to take pictures with us individually, then there was the group shot, then there were our mulitple books! But this post isn't about my adventures meeting Ree, but cooking!! Let's get back to the cake!
This cake has a lot of ingredients, but is really not hard to make. The recipe can be found in Ree Drummond's latest cookbook, The Pioneer Women Cooks: Food from My Frontier. I hope you don't mind, I don't like to post a recipe that isn't mine and can be found in a cookbook. I would be happy to share it with you if you ask, you can buy her wonderful cookbook, or you can go to Ree's website by clicking here for her Italian Creme Cake.
I will share some of the process with you.
One of the techniques used to make this cake is creating a merangue by whipping egg whites.
After transfering the egg whites, clean out the bowl and use it make the batter.
You then fold the egg whites into the batter. The batter is a bit lumpy. It looks like this in Ree's pics, too. If you aren't familiar with the Pioneer Women, one of the great things about her website and her cookbooks is she includes great pics. You know what everything should look like!
I divided the batter between 3 round cake pans for a nice high layer cake. (That's Ree's cookbook right next to the cake as it cools. I love it! I love her. Do you think it is a little weird I call her Ree? Me, too! But she just makes you feel that way, like you know her.)
For me, part of what makes this cake so wonderful is it's frosting. It contains cream cheese, which is not one of my husband's favorites (and it was his birthday), so I decided to make half butter frosting and half cream cheese. I used colored tooth picks pushed in the sides of the cake at the bottom to keep track of which side was which. I will never do it this way again. He said it was too sweet (I NEVER thought I would hear those words come from his mouth.). He has actually had a store bought version of this cake before, and I don't think he even realized it was cream cheese in the frosting - hmmmm.
I think it turned out really good. I will make it again if we are having people over. All of the kids couldn't come over for his birthday dinner, so there was a lot of cake. It is sooo different cooking for a few, after so many years cooking for 7; which at one time included 5 teenagers - 3 of them boys! I would also make it for a church pot luck.
Yumm! This makes me miss it!!
Do you have a favorite from scratch cake recipe? Does your husband insist he doesn't like something, only he eats it when he doesn't know what it is?
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