For generations, this white cake, with a Swiss meringue-type white frosting poured over with melted chocolate, was served on the Neues family’s birthday. My father introduced it to our immediate family, as his father did to him. At least it goes all the way back to my great-grandfather at Noyes ancestral home, Edgewater Farm (now owned by my cousins Mac and Laura Burford) near Waterloo, Nebraska. ). This dessert is a jewel of our family’s culinary heritage. No, it’s not a vanity project.This has been the name of the cake through the ages.I was heartbroken when I couldn’t find a copy of this cookbook recipe. And at the last minute — who had been moving cookbooks from home to the farmhouse after finishing writing — my grandmother’s little spiral bound book entitled Kitchen Secrets fell off the pile. Just by chance (this seems to happen to me often, my recipe tester Bonnie Benwick calls it beshert or destiny in Yiddish), the cover slipped off and the first loose inside The page was the recipe for this cake. Auntie’s hand. It took a few tweaks to bring it to today (in the original instructions, such as “add a walnut-sized portion of butter”), but my very understanding editor sneaked it into the dessert line-up. It was given to me.
Since then, my cousin Carol Clarke has sent me a copy of the same recipe my great-grandmother wrote. That note proves the magic of frosting. correct. The cake tastes better after a few days. It tastes like candy and is very delicious. This makes it a treasured single-layer version that stays true to a historic family recipe, but sometimes the recipe is doubled to make a two-layer cake for larger events.—Brian Noyes, from his new cookbook, red truck bakery farmhouse cookbook.
You can read Noyes’ interview here.
