March Birthday Cake: Green and White Cake

I was in Illinois this past week for a family reunion (of sorts) and birthday celebrations. On my side of the family, we have five birthdays from the last week in February through the end of March. That’s a lot of celebrating! And two of those were first birthdays. Sandwiched between all of those birthdays was St. Patrick’s Day, so I found it fitting that this month’s cake from the Birthday Cake For Every Month card was a Green and White Cake in honor of that raucous Irish holiday. It was also fitting because my family has a high percentage of Irish heritage and my brothers missed being St. Patty’s Day babies by a matter of hours.

This is another recipe from the New Party Cakes For All Occasions booklet and it also uses a boiled icing. Although I appreciate the challenge of making boiled icings, I don’t enjoy eating them. And since I was bringing this cake down to IL to share with my family, I wanted to make something that everyone would want to eat.  The cake is an angel food cake, so I chose a frosting that would compliment the light, airy taste and texture of the cake – whipped cream/cream cheese frosting. Here’s the recipe:

Whipped Cream/Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:
1 8oz. package of cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 ½ cups heavy whipping cream

Directions:
Beat the whipping cream until it forms a stiff peak then set aside (I’ve learned that it works best if you chill the bowl and beaters first). In a separate bowl, combine the cream cheese, sugar, salt and vanilla. Beat until smooth. Then fold in the whipped cream. (I also added green food coloring to my frosting.)

The directions in the New Party Cakes For All Occasions booklet instruct you to decorate the cake with shamrock sprinkles. It took me an entire day of driving around the Twin Cities to find shamrock sprinkles. When I finally found them (at Joann Fabric and Craft Stores – I love that place, first a doll cake topper and now shamrock sprinkles, they’re lifesavers!) I bought two bottles. Just in case.

Also, a note about the cake recipe: it calls for 1 ¼ cups of egg whites. For me, that turned out to be 8 egg whites. I looked everywhere for a conversion chart, but found it was easiest to keep separating eggs until I got the amount I needed.

I had never made a homemade angel food cake before and can honestly say, I don’t think I’ll ever buy one again. This is an easy recipe to make and you can taste the homemade difference. My whole family agreed that the whipped cream/cream cheese frosting was a good choice. If you make it and choose a different one, let me know! 

I also wanted to share some of the illustrations from the New Party Cakes For All Occasions booklet with you. This was one of my favorites; it’s a story of two brides who are each making a cake for their husband. One follows the lessons she learned from the Betty Crocker radio show and uses Gold Medal Cake Flour. The other doesn’t. Look how it turns out:

I think the best part is that they are sitting at the dinner table dressed for a black tie event. Oh, how times have changed (this booklet was printed in 1931). If that was a picture from dinner at my house, Ryan and I would be sitting in front of the TV eating off TV trays and Murphy would be resting his chin on my tray with a puddle of drool forming beneath his lips. And we’d be in jeans or PJs. To our credit, we don’t have a dining room or an eat-in kitchen so we couldn’t sit at a nice table to eat anyway. Maybe this week I’ll make Ryan a fancy cake and put on an old bridesmaid dress for dinner. Since he doesn’t wear a suit and tie to work, I’d have to settle for his business casual attire. I think that might make him question my sanity even more than the time he came home and I was making a dress for a doll that I was putting on top of the Queen of Hearts Cake. But that’s what I love so much about this recipe box, it’s an adventure and a history lesson wrapped together and served with a delicious, edible moral at the end.