rushthatspeaks | Black Cake

Laurie Colwin, whom I have mentioned here recently, is one of the friendliest possible food writers. She understands that people want to eat well quickly, or cheaply, or both, and she understands that things go wrong and that extremely ornate food is rather more liable to go wrong than the simple kind. She has multiple essays devoted to the worst things she ever perpetrated in a kitchen, and an essay on the worst meals she has ever been served which makes me laugh every time I so much as think about it.*

It is therefore probably ironic that the most time-consuming cake I have ever made comes straight out of one of her essays. It is not her recipe; it comes from her daughter's nanny, who came from St. Vincent. The nanny brought in a slice of her homemade Black Cake at a holiday, and Colwin, after rhapsodizing about the taste of the cake for approximately fifteen hundred well-chosen words, got the recipe written down, stared at it glumly, and decided it was just a tad intimidating. Which it is.

The thing is, though, she chose her words very well. I have had many fruitcakes in my life, some terrible, some good, and a couple (from Jamaica, with rum in) verging on the sublime, but two things became obvious to me the first time I read Colwin's essay on Black Cake: 1) I had never in my life eaten anything which could even be considered a relation of Black Cake, not ever; and 2) if I wanted to taste this specific cake, I was going to have to gather my powers and bake it myself, as, even though I have been to St. Vincent and was looking, I did not happen across any for sale.

I read the essay for the first time somewhere between five and ten years ago. This summer, I finally baked a Black Cake, for my birthday, and this is how I did it.

The recipe saith:

Chop extra, extra fine one pound of raisins, one pound of prunes, one pound of currants, one pound of glacé cherries and 3/4 pound of mixed peel. For a grainier texture, leave some of the currants whole. Pour into a large bowl or crock and cover with one bottle of Passover wine and one bottle of the darkest rum you can find. Marinate at least two weeks-- but the longer the better-- up to six months.

This required a little deciphering. My birthday is the twenty-ninth of August, and I decided I really wanted the fruit in the alcohol for a month. Also, the cake is meant to sit for a week after baking and before serving. So I knew I would have to order anything I had to buy on the internet at the beginning of July, to make sure to get it marinating by July 22nd.

Also, this amount of fruit and wine is meant to make two cakes. I did not want two cakes for my birthday, but the nice round quantity numbers meant it would be much easier to buy fruit if I just went with it. I decided I'd make the fruit in the recipe quantities and then only use half the fruit sludge for my birthday cake. We'd have the second cake at Christmas, which in addition would demonstrate any significant flavor changes from the fruit sitting substantially longer.

So I went to the hardware store, where I was lucky enough to run into a canning sale, and bought a very large glass jar with a tightly fitting snap-lid. I think it is two gallons, but I am not entirely sure as it wasn't labeled. I just wanted it to be large enough to contain a great deal of fruit and wine, and I wanted it to be clear so I could see if anything went dramatically wrong (very unlikely, as neither sugar nor alcohol are great environments for, say, breeding mold, but still).

Then it was time to buy fruit. Raisins: easy. Supermarket. Ditto prunes. An upmarket organic grocery/gardening center near here had dried currants, at a price which merely made me wince. But glacé cherries are seasonal around here and only findable during December, as is most peel. Looking up the traditional British mixed peel, it appeared that I wanted equal amounts of lemon, orange, and citron, of which only the lemon could have been obtained locally in July. And I could get a shipping discount for ordering the lemon from the same place as the rest of the peel, so I spent much of July waiting for that and the cherries to arrive.

It all arrived fairly promptly, so I headed to the liquor store, and bought a rum so dark it called itself black and (sigh) a bottle of Manischewitz. I do not much like Manischewitz, but it is what I read for 'Passover wine'. I've been to the Nidhe Israel Synagogue in Barbados, which has been in use as a synagogue since 1654, and I know there are a couple of other synagogues in the Caribbean of similar vintage, so I wasn't surprised to see a kosher sweet wine in a West Indian fruitcake.

Finally, ingredients assembled, somewhere around the nineteenth of July, I stared at the fruit and felt my resolve waver. It was obvious to me that chopping all of it via Cuisinart would do precisely one thing: make jam. The alcohol is meant to be able to permeate the fruit, which means a great many tiny separate pieces instead of a puree, because the sugar coming out of the fruit into the puree would hold it together in a mass-- try dissolving some jam in wine without stirring it and you'll see what I mean, it really doesn't want to. Chopping doesn't destabilize the cells of the fruit in the same way. People have been making this cake for hundreds of years, I said to myself. It's a good chance to work on your knife skills, I said to myself. If you were still at a restaurant you'd chop more than this every damn day, I said to myself. You knew you were going to do this when you ordered all this fruit, I added, as the final word to myself. Somehow, I was not convinced.

So I did it anyway and badly hurt my wrist.

I was, of course, being an idiot, as I had managed to forget the existence of chopping bowl technology, which I am now absolutely certain is what a sensible person would use for this. If I do this cake at all often I am buying a chopping bowl. But I did not think of that until afterwards.

The cherries weren't too bad. I was neon pink to the shoulders, but I've had worse from beets. The peel went by in a completely reasonable fashion, although I had to break and come back the next day at that point, because my knife hand was complaining. The next day, I found out that chopping prunes is terrible. They don't want to be held. They squash. You have to sort of sliver them, and it took longer than seemed reasonable, and then, oh god, the raisins. Chopping raisins extremely fine is a circle of hell. Doing them one by one will drive you batty, but they're hard to hold together, and you have to get them into a clump about the size of, say, a prune, and then squeeze that clump together with a finger on the top and willpower and feed it under the chopping knife and hope you continually miss trimming your nails, and there are a fair number of raisins in a pound-- anyway, I had to take another overnight break.

sovay, bless her, volunteered to help with the currants. There are infinite currants in a pound. They are so small that it's hard to tell whether you've chopped them, until you compare a pile of chopped and unchopped and notice the definite textural difference. I am pretty sure that bit in the recipe where it says you can leave some unchopped is to keep you from screaming and throwing your giant crock out the window if you can't face any more of the things, because who wants a grainy birthday cake? Not me, is the issue, so we chopped them all, and I do not think I would have got through without help, because even with two of us it was a maddening, iterative, Lovecraftian kitchen nightmare and nobody should ever do it, and also I couldn't use my knife hand for anything for about a week. Chopping bowl. Seriously. Do not do this by hand. Learn from my misery.

So then we poured the alcohol over the fruit in the jar and stirred as thoroughly as our muscles could handle-- this is 'churning concrete' territory in terms of strength needed-- and the mix already looked and tasted surprisingly pleasant. I slapped a label with the sealing date on the side of the jar and put it on a bottom shelf where it was out of the way but I could still keep an eye on it as I walked by. And that was the first part of Black Cake.

For the first few days of being jarred, the fruit looked like canned fruit cocktail, bright pieces peeking through a liquid. Then it suddenly and dramatically turned to brown, non-liquid sludge, overnight. Then every few days there would be an obvious inch or so of liquid on the top, which would be reabsorbed over a few days more, a process it has kept on doing. I have no idea why. The really interesting thing was that curled around the jar was suddenly one of the cat's favorite places. I leaned down and gave a good sniff, and I did get a very very faint hint of something rather Christmas-y, but it could also have been the cool roundness of the glass side attracting him. I wound up rearranging objects so he couldn't lie there, because I didn't want him to knock the thing over by mistake. He occasionally complains to me about this even now, because the jar being only half-full has not reduced its powers of cat-drawing.

Anyway, it got to be late August, and the recipe saith:

Cream one pound of butter and one pound of dark brown sugar.

Add the fruit and wine.

Add one tablespoon of vanilla and 1/2 teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon.

Beat in one dozen eggs.

Add one pound plus 1/2 cup of flour and three teaspoons of baking powder. Add one pound of burnt sugar or one 4-oz. bottle of burnt sugar essence if you can find it. Batter should be dark brown.

Bake in two deep 9-inch, well-buttered and floured cake tins for 1 to 1 1/4 hours at 350 F.

When the cake is absolutely cool, wrap it in waxed paper or tin foil-- not plastic wrap-- and let it sit until you are ready to ice it, at least one week.

Remember, that is two cakes!

sovay came over to help me bake, and we halved everything. As for the burnt sugar essence, Colwin includes a method for scorching brown sugar into a bitter caramel, but I ordered mine online from a Jamaican shop. They sent along with it a complimentary bottle of meat browning, which apparently one uses to dye meat to a more appetizing shade, and which I now have no idea what to do with-- would anybody like it?

Upon opening the burnt sugar essence, it seemed likely that this substance was initially some kind of byproduct of either rum refining or sugar manufacture. It is as black and shiny as obsidian and the consistency of an uber-molasses, pourable but sloooooowly. We dipped fingers. It tastes very sweet, but also, well, the best way I have to describe it is imagine that you have put a charcoal briquette directly in your mouth, but the element of taste in charcoal that tells you that you really shouldn't be eating it has gone away. It tastes as ashes would taste if ashes were food and were good for you, and then there's that hindlayer of sugar. I have never had anything else that remotely resembles it in flavor. Also, as some industrial chemicals do, it has the quality of staying on your fingers forever and coming off on everything else you touch for the next half-hour even if you only brushed it in passing, no matter how you wash. It dyed my fingerprint whorls brownish-red for three days.

The baking itself was fairly straightforward, especially since I was sensible and we went directly for the stand mixer, none of this beating by hand. I do recommend having at least two people to manipulate the fruit jar, because it is heavy and unwieldy. The smell on cracking it open was delicious and also alcoholic beyond telling. The fruit mixture itself, ditto. It would make a great cocktail ingredient except that half of one drink would knock a person out.

The cake batter, which was indeed dark brown, was ambrosial and combined all the best aspects of the burnt sugar essence and the fruit mixture. Unfortunately, its alcohol fumes were such that I felt that, although I could have sat down and eaten a bowl of it without worrying about food poisoning, as no bacteria could handle that environment, I would not have survived. The other problem was the sheer quantity of the stuff. As I said, we halved everything. My cake tins are, thank you, six inches deep. I think of them as deep-dish cake tins.

This is not remotely deep enough. I hoped it would all go in the dish if we poured, but it became obvious that despite best efforts we had two cakes, or at least two cake layers, and the second was more than half the height of the first. We simply had a ridiculous amount of batter. I decided we probably needed the flavor interruption of the frosting between the layers anyhow.

The cat plastered himself to the oven door while the cakes were baking, calling plaintively, pawing, and peering inside. It did smell good, and he is addicted to pastry, but this was ridiculous. Whenever we tested for doneness he had to be forcibly removed because he would have crawled straight in to Valhalla. It's not for you, I kept saying. You're not old enough to drink. Not that he paid any attention.

The tops baked looking like asphalt! I mean that absolutely literally. Black and shiny and crystalline as mica. New-laid asphalt. Lovely sight. I relied entirely on skewer tests and decided to go on the short side with the baking as my stove has often run hot. The amount of alcohol offgassing had decreased significantly when we took them out, which seemed a good sign.

They took about four hours to cool completely (far far away from the cat), but were no trouble at all to get out of the tins. At which point I tasted the crumb coat on the bottom of the tins and decided I had probably underbaked, but not by enough to make it feasible to do anything about it, and not by enough to be a real problem. Sigh. But the cakes wrapped nicely in foil and went into a cupboard, which promptly started smelling like a frat party even though foil is supposed to seal that sort of thing in and I'd taped all the edges. Then I scraped off and ate the rest of the crumbs from the tin, because this stuff was improving in flavor with everything I did to it. I put the tins in the sink for the morning and lay down, and then I facepalmed, and got up again, and went and removed the cat from the tin where he had curled up contentedly and arranged things to keep him out of the sink. And that was part two of Black Cake.

The cake sat for a week, and B. was in town, which meant we went out for dinner a lot, which meant not using the stove. I got up one morning to find Ruth and B. in the kitchen discussing a smell of gas; the landlord came down and we determined that it was the stove leaking and it would be best to get a new one. So be wary of this cake, it took out our stove, it was the Last Thing Baked.

Luckily, the icing did not require cooking. The recipe saith:

Black Cake must be iced. The icing is the simplest white icing made of powdered sugar and egg white with the addition of half a teaspoon of almond extract. This is essential and a perfect foil to the complexity of the cake.**

This is royal icing and you can find a more complete recipe anywhere; I think I used Alton Brown's. You beat egg white into stiff peaks and then beat in as much powdered sugar as it takes to get the consistency you want. A pinch of salt is a good idea, and usually instead of almond extract people use lemon juice, which I just swapped out for the almond. In a stand mixer, this is barely even work, but the thing to keep in mind is that royal icing, as time goes by, irrevocably sets into a rock-like consistency. Get it on the cake as quick as you can manage.

I didn't do anything by way of decoration as I was not in a piping sort of mood, but royal icing is good for that sort of thing and Colwin says that cakes of this sort are often wedding cakes and frequently wind up very ornate.

And then I served the Black Cake at birthday tea that afternoon, with an extremely large pile of cucumber sandwiches.

It is, in fact, extremely good, and does not in any way resemble anything I or any of my guests had ever had. Six people managed to get through a quarter of the cake, because it is ridiculously rich, and also still a tad alcoholic; but on the other hand it keeps forever. It is almost totally unlike chocolate but approaching life from the same general portion of the flavor spectrum, if that makes any sense. I was and remain proud of it.

A week later, Ruth and I were walking with it down the hill to

jinian's and I said, meditatively, "You know, I'm really glad it isn't raining," and Ruth asked why, and I said "Because I'm worried someone might leave the cake out and it took so--" and then for no reason at all and unprovoked she growled and bit my nose. So there's also that.

Things I will do to improve the one at Christmas:
-- I will make it in two even layers, intentionally, because the thicker cake was perceptibly both more underbaked and more alcoholic
-- I will bake it longer
-- I will put a sheet of marzipan between the layers, just try and stop me
-- I will strongly consider a different icing, as I agree about the almond but am unconvinced about the rocklike hardness; that said it does require something very light and without added butter, maybe a water icing?

And that is Black Cake.

* In brief, Colwin's hostess says that dinner will be a variation on starry-gazey pie, a medieval dish named after the eels whose unskinned heads can be seen poking up out of the top crust. "In what way," Colwin asks cautiously, "does it vary?" "Well", says the hostess, "I couldn't find eels at the marketplace this morning. So I bought squid."

Colwin does not say anything else about this dinner. No more needs to be, or could be, said.

** Recipe quotations taken from Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, Laurie Colwin, Vintage Books, 2010, pp. 181-3.