Ugly Betty

My mom gave me her very old Betty Crocker cook book maybe a year ago. You know the one, like a big orange binder? Well, I may have taken it from her house. . . with some later permission to do so, but anyway, it had been in my possession for a while now and I hadn't used it, until recently.

Of course I wanted the book because of the cake recipes. Old recipes are usually good ones, right? They're classic. They're the ones you want to keep around for a while and share with others (or maybe not, depending on who your crowd is!) I figured if anyone was going to teach me how to make a great cake it would be Betty Crocker. And in my seemingly endless search for a moist yellow cake recipe, that I was convinced needed oil instead of butter, Betty had my back.

I found a lot of recipes in this great book that called for shortening. I think that's just plain gross, so those recipes were out. I mean, for decorator's frosting or even pie crust that's one thing, but otherwise, that's nasty. I kept looking and found Betty's recipe for Two Egg Chiffon Cake. By definition, I've now learned that a chiffon cake uses oil instead of butter. That's what I was looking for! What was also part of the process was separating the eggs. I whipped the whites to a meringue to be folded in later, which makes the cake light and fluffy. So we have moist. . . light. . . fluffy. . . all good things. I was excited!

After some minor issues whipping up the egg whites (humidity. . . ) the cake came out of the oven and luckily looked perfectly fine. The recipe recommended using a Pineapple Butter Frosting to top it off, so I did. It was just butter, confectioner's sugar, and drained, crushed pineapple. It's pretty hard to drain crushed pineapple completely though, so the liquid left in there is why I didn't need any milk. Other than being sweet, the frosting was really good! With the cake though, the whole thing tasted GREAT! Of course with the pieces of crushed pineapple throughout the frosting, I wasn't able to smooth it over and have it look anything close to even semi-professional. . . so I present you with "Ugly Betty. "