Happy (belated) Birthday, Pride and Prejudice

I got really excited about the 200th birthday of Pride and Prejudice.  It was in the news, and all over facebook, and I decided I wanted to do something to celebrate.  And how do we usually celebrate birthdays?  With cake!

I  started by looking through my copy of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.  When in doubt, BHG is the first place I turn-- either their website or the book.  I settled on Citrus Yellow Cake, mostly because all the ingredients I needed were already in my house.

So, a bit of a breakdown:

Creaming butter and sugar.  This recipe doesn't actually use that phrase, which is nice for beginners (I remember years of running from the kitchen to check with my mom exactly what "cream" meant.  this picture might have been helpful.)

Adding the eggs gives this wonderful custard-y texture.  It's because egg yolks are an excellent emulsifier.  They allow the watery liquids (egg whites) to combine with fatty liquids (such as oil or butter).

After the milk is added, the batter takes on a slightly weird, almost grainy texture.  Don't be alarmed!

I used dried orange zest to give the cake citrus flavor.  It turned out pretty mild, with just a hint of orange.  I honestly would like more, so next time I think I'll try adding it sooner, like with the milk and/or flour, to give it more time to release its flavor before baking.


I baked in a 19x13-inch pyrex pan.  After baking, I trimmed the edges to give the cake a more boxy shape, then iced the cake with a thin layer of frosting (from a can, just something I had left over from another cake, actually).  I then broke out my fondant.  If you don't watch Ace of Cakes or anything like that, fondant is a thick, moldable cake covering.  Homemade (I'll try to blog about this later), it's created from marshmallows and powdered sugar.  I'm not exactly sure how they make it commercially, but consensus is that homemade tastes better.  If you want to buy some, I've found it in the cake-decorating (kind of by cards and party supplies) section of Wal-Mart.

I dyed a portion of my fondant light brown for the cover, and left a smaller portion white to make pages.  I started by applying the pages to 3 of the 4 edges, using a ruler and pizza cutter to get the right size and shape.  The cover was harder, because it is a much larger piece.  I ended up draping it over the whole cake, then trimming the edges.  To get the bottom cover, I cut thin strips of fondant and just laid them along the edge.  I scored the white pieces with a knife to give them page texture.

 Finally, I took a piece of Baker's chocolate, melted it, and used a folded piece of waxed paper to pipe it onto my cake, creating the title, by-line, and spine of the book.

Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice!

Oh!  It occurs to me a couple days later that I really ought to have mentioned storing fondant-covered cakes.   A normal iced or un-iced cake has a tendency to go stale, right?  So, I usually keep cakes in a cake-saver.  This isn't necessary with fondant-coevered cakes.  Just put plastic wrap against the exposed cake.  Otherwise your fondant tend to get moist.  Homemade fondant seems more prone to this than store-bought.  If it doesn't bother you, go ahead and store in a cake-saver anyway.  It doesn't affect taste, just texture.