The Black Book of Cake

A year ago when I started Procrastibaking (the blog, not the past time; the past time is well established), I wondered, 'How long am I going to be able to keep this malarkey up?'.  Well, happy first birthday Procrastibaking!

My first ever blog post was about a cake that I made for a cocktail party.  The party is annual, and though last year I decided that the appropriate cake for a cocktail party was one that contained booze, this year I decided to draw on the medieval department throwing the fête; I made a manuscript cake.

There are numerous examples of book cakes out there in the internet, some of them better than others.  There are fewer sets of instructions for making them, however.  An exception is provided by Jessicakes, where you can find very detailed directions for making an open book cake (which was what I was after - where's the fun in a closed book?).  I appreciate the attention to detail that Jessica put into her cake, and especially the thought devoted to its structure.  Up until the day before I put the cake together, I was going to follow her example.  Then two things happened.  The first was that the only foam board (needed to support the spine) that I could find was expensive.  The second was the realization that no library would ever allow a precious manuscript to be laid open flat on a table.  Manuscripts need to be supported by pillows so that a tight binding doesn't result in torn pages; they should generally not be open flat.  Instead of two layers of cake laid out side-by-side, then, I decided that I was going to stack a smaller rectangle cake (the book) on top of a larger rectangle cake (the pillow).

I had already baked two layers of cake when I changed tack.  At least, they were two layers baked; in reality they were four layers worth of cake, as I had to double the recipe to fill the roasting pans I baked them in.  Have you ever wondered if you could bake cake in a roasting pan?  Wonder no more!  I greased and floured the pan like any other.  Then when I lined it I used extra-large rectangles of parchment so that there would be enough to go up the sides of the pan.  Just fold the parchment over itself at the corners to form to the pan, and trim some of the excess if necessary (I found that having a bit to grab onto to pull the cake out was helpful).

Having made it this far into the post, it's probably time I talk about the cake cake, the actual stuff that was inside the manuscript.  Because the decoration of the cake was going to be rather complicated, I wanted the cake itself to be relatively simple.  I opted for a basic (but yummy) yellow cake, layered with raspberry jam and iced, of course, with buttercream (a necessity for fondant cakes).  I adapted this recipe from Real Simple, and my version can be found in the Recipe Box.

I won't dwell on mixing the cake here: combine dry ingredients, beat sugar into butter followed by eggs and vanilla.  This recipe calls for milk (I substituted buttermilk) and this should be combined with the beaten butter in five alternating additions with the dry mix, starting with the dry mix.  Then into the roasting-turned-cake pan it goes!

Then rinse and repeat.  Also, make some swiss meringue buttercream.  The recipe is in the Recipe Box, with additional directions available in Great Chieftain o' the Puddin' Race and Sophisticated Swine.  For this cake I added two tablespoons of lemon extract, because who doesn't love a raspberry and lemon combo?  The only other thing that I'll add about swiss buttercream in this post is that, as with any recipe that calls for separating eggs, it is prudent to do the separating over a bowl that is not the bowl you are collecting the whites in.  I didn't do this.  I never do this.  And it's always the last yolk that breaks into the whites. *sigh*

It's no use crying over a broken yolk.

I still wasn't quite sure how I was going to create the book even after I'd decided to stack it on a pillow.  I knew that I would cut one of my two layers in half and turn it so that it was wider than it was tall, just like the pillow base.  It was creating the angles of an open book that I wasn't certain of.  I googled something along the lines of 'angled cake' and came up with a Wilton post on topsy turvy cakes.  In the end this didn't affect how I made the book - which I decided to simply carve - but it gave me the idea to set the book into the pillow layer, to really give the impression that the pillow had moulded around the book.

I started the process by splitting the pillow layer (remember to do this when the cake is cold but not completely frozen, so it isn't crumbly but also not impossible to cut) and then I filled it with a layer of jam.  The next step is to carve the hole for the book to sit in.  Though it's not what I did, it might be cleaner to do this from the top layer alone, before it is joined with its jam-covered bottom.  In this way, rather than peeling the carved-out top layer from the hole, as shown below, the top layer could be carved and then lifted (leaving the hole behind) onto the prepared bottom layer.  The risk here is that the edges of the top layer are too thin, and in the lifting the cake would break.  Freezing the layer would make it more stable, however, and if you like a gamble...

After I cut the book layer in half, I rounded the corners to make it more manuscript-like.  Then I placed it on top of the pillow and used toothpicks to mark the edges of where to carve.  This worked fairly well, though the hole should be widened a bit after carving because once the cake is iced and covered the space otherwise becomes just a little too tight.

Gently use a small offset spatula to remove the centre of the hole.  I then carved the edges to slope inward and deeper in the middle, to reflect the shape of a pillow with a manuscript in it.  Next ice this part of the cake with buttercream and place it in the refrigerator or freezer to harden while finishing up the book.  Because I was going to be sinking the book into the hole of the pillow, I decided to stack both halves of the second layer to make a very tall manuscript.  I split the layers and then shaped the open pages by marking a line down the middle of the cake and carving down and inward towards that line from just inside of the right and left edges.

Once carved, I iced the book with buttercream.

One mistake I made was taking the pillow out of the freezer and letting it sit only ten minutes or so before covering it with fondant.  Covering a cake that is too cold can make the fondant sweat, and that's what happened.  Fortunately for me, I had already imprinted the fondant with a paper towel to get a fabric-like finish on the pillow, so I continued to use paper towels to remove the sweat.  This will obviously not work for a cake that needs smooth fondant.  Another trick, which, combined with time to dry out worked quite well, was brushing the fondant with corn starch.  I used a large clean makeup brush and lightly powdered the fondant.  By the morning the cake was perfectly matte!

Don't forget, when colouring fondant don't use standard liquid food dye - this will make the fondant very sticky, especially with the quantity it would take to make the colour dark.  To make the flesh colour of vellum (the calf skin from which the pages of many medieval manuscripts were made) I used a combination of yellow, some red and a little black.  After I finished mixing the colours but before I rolled out the fondant, I put the book in the freezer for a few brief minutes, just so that it would be a little stiff when I had to pick it up and put it in the pillow.

This fondant is still too thick to use for covering.

Covering the book was relatively problem-free, but as with any cake with angles you have to handle the fondant gently around the corners and smooth it quickly before it dries and cracks.  Thicker fondant will hide more of the flaws under it, and will be a little less likely to tear on the corners, but for me, taste-wise, a thinner layer of fondant is desirable.

When I iced the book, I wanted the edges to be rounded.  If I had been making a modern book, with their precise and sharp corners, my book would have been too soft, and this softness was only amplified when I put the book into the pillow.  I hadn't made the hole quite large enough to compensate for the additional girth of the buttercream and fondant, so the fondant on the sides of the book billowed out a bit when they pushed up on the edges of the hole, and simultaneously the fondant on on part of the pillow was pulled down by the book and tore - but what else is a book cover for if not for covering tears in fondant?

But before I made the book cover, I made four pages to lay on top of the book to give it more depth.  Using an offset spatula I pressed lines into the side of the book to give the impression of pages, but manuscript pages often don't lie flat and the edges may be a little wrinkled or warped, so adding a couple of pages on top reflected that.  If I were to do it again, however, I would try to make the indentations of the lower pages more pronounced to better blend in with the top pages.

To make the top pages even more realistic, I lightly pricked holes all over them to look like the pores in vellum.  I also cut out a large hole (holes are often found in vellum, especially if it is of a lower quality), and poked holes vertically along the outer edges of the pages to mark the ruling.

After some debating, I decided to paint a real text on the manuscript, and after some more debating I chose a passage from the Medieval Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda, specifically from a section on the Laws of the Court.  The version I used is from National Library of Wales Peniarth 29, The Black Book of Chirk (Llyfr Du o'r Waun), and it outlines the rights of the court bakeress - perfect for a manuscript cake!  For anyone who is interested (because this post isn't long enough already):

'Huyduet e popuryes hy a dely y buyt or llys ay dyllat a seyc pan uo i e brenyn a theyssen dyuet poby o pop amryu ulaut a pop. ay guely en e buyty. ny dely keuody rac neb tra uo en poby. y naud eu hy y buryho ay crauell. y sarhaet eu trayan sarhaet y gur ony byt gur hanner saraet y braut y guerth na hy a uo guedu na hy ny uo hanner guerth y braut.'  (Peniarth 29, p. 27)

'Eighth is the bakeress.  She is entitled to her food from the court and her clothes and a dish when the king is present, and at the end of the day a cake from each type of flour which was baked, and her bed is in the kitchen.  It is not right for her to rise for anyone when she is baking.  Her protection is as far as she can throw her spatula.  Her value is a third of her husband's value unless her husband is half the value of her brother; her value, should she be married or not married, is half the value of her brother.'

For painting the cake, I used the same gels that I had used to colour the fondant (excluding yellow).  I'd never painted on a cake before, so I got some tips from That Really Frosts Me and The Hand-Painted Cake, a free Craftsy class by Erin Schaefgen (Craftsy is a pretty useful tool; I haven't paid for a class yet, but I know people who have and have really enjoyed them).  Fortunately my sister had given me a whole set of brushes at Christmas for just this type of production, so I was ready to go on that front, but I also purchased a cheap thing (it was in the kitchen section - to be honest I don't know what its intended use is) to mix my gels in.  You mix the gels as you would paint, the primary difference being that you dilute them with a bit of alcohol, which evaporates as the colour dries.  Vodka is widely recommended but I used gin - as long as it's clear and edible it doesn't matter.

The style of my manuscript was based on National Library of Wales Peniarth 1, The Black Book of Carmarthen (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin), and the cake was even fairly close to the real manuscript's size.  Part of the charm of the Black Book is its size; it's a small book, often considered to have been the personal collection of a single scribe.  Despite its not being a grand professional production, however, it is nicely decorated with drawings in the margins, an unusual feature for Welsh manuscripts.  Naturally I drew on that and painted a hand holding the pivotal word crauell, 'spatula'.  Everything I painted I wrote out first on a piece of parchment paper the size of the book, and I kept a piece of spare fondant out to practice on.  Having a small container of gin (or vodka) and q-tips to hand is also useful, because they can be used to erase mistakes if you act fast.  Just dip the end of a q-tip in the alcohol and rub out the error very gently, perhaps using the other dry end of the q-tip to clean it up further.

I had already made my binding by this point.  The Black Book of Cake needed a black cover, naturally, so I dyed some fondant black and rolled it out, cutting four strips and inch or so wide and a bit longer than the sides of the manuscript to which they would be applied.  The overhang on the corners should be cut at a 45° angle so that they can be joined up (just press them lightly together and smooth if necessary).  Using the handle of my paintbrush I made two indentations to mark the spine on both the back and the front of the manuscript.  The final touch was to make a pair of  'snakes', lengths of curtain weights which are used to hold manuscripts open without causing them any damage.  I made these by rolling out plain white fondant into thin ropes and then segmenting them by squeezing them between the tubes of two q-tips.  In the end I opted not to drape the snakes over the manuscript because 1.) they were coming apart if too much gravity pulled on them and 2.) I'd just spent all that time painting the thing, why cover it up?  Only one person at the party called me out on that; the librarians would not be pleased.