It’s been a while now, but I remember quite a few late night meals at the Dog House before it closed. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years! So when I saw this matchbook cover on Flickr, it made me smile.

Photo by Roadsidepictures.

This is the scarf I’m currently working on. Once I block it the leaves will be flatter. The yarn is Noro Kureyon, of course.

While I was searching for something else, I stumbled on this fairly horrifying story, published in the Schenectady Gazette, April 14, 1923. If you click on it you can see a larger copy. It says:

CHILD FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER

Montrose, Pa., April 13.—Four-year old Elmer Washburn, confessed slayer of Silas Payne, an aged recluse, was found guilty of murder in the second degree by a jury today. He will be sentenced later.

Young Washburn, it was testified at the trial, had seen Payne counting $2,000 in gold on numerous occasions at his shack near Montrose. The lure of the gold, the lad said, was too strong for him and he confessed that he had sneaked up behind the recluse and clubbed him to death. The gold was later recovered where Washburn told the authorities he had hid it.

Can that story be true? I didn’t have a chance to do any serious research on it. But I can’t imagine a four-year old child being able to club someone to death. Could it have been an error for “fourteen”?

Follow-up: Yes, it was an error. He was fourteen. I found it in the New York Times, November 2, 1922. Still a horrible story, but, sadly, much more believable.

Hi all, long time no see. So I’ll just jump right in with a new knitting pattern for your downloading and knitting pleasure!

I was planning to go to a famous quadrennial winter sports competition, and thought the arena might be chilly, so I designed these wristwarmers that should keep any winter sports fan warm. The name alludes to both a “twizzle” (an ice skating move, also visually reflected in the cable pattern) and a certain mountain venue…

You can download the pattern here in PDF format.

This pattern is Worthware — that means, if you like it, please send what you think it’s worth via the PayPal button here. I hope you think it’s worth something. Thanks for looking at my pattern!

When Kristen and I started the Resurrected Recipes blog some time ago, its momentum was stalled quickly by the implosion (not literally) of my kitchen stove, and the resulting deconstruction and remodeling of the kitchen that followed. It was difficult to cook anything with no kitchen. But I continued thinking of things to post about, and now I have a bunch of topics waiting to go. (Still not enough actual cooking, but there will be that, too.) There are a bunch of new posts there now, so please do stop by if you are interested.

From The Delineator, summer 1903:

The Delineator was published by Butterick, the sewing pattern company, and included fashion articles and pictures, along with short stories and other articles. In one 1903 issue, there is a mention of the recent passing of Ebenezer Butterick, who founded the Butterick company in 1863 — and invented the graded paper sewing pattern.

The Butterick company still exists, but it is now part of McCall Pattern Company (which I think has itself been acquired by some other firm). Butterick patterns, for some weird reason, always seem to have annoying and confusing directions, compared to other pattern companies. I don’t know why. I’m glad they still exist, though.

Found in a 1910 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, and perfect for a bungalow like ours:

This one was upside down for some reason:

More after the jump.
View the rest of this entry…

This ORCA card needs a sleeve. Photo by Atomic Taco.

I haven’t been posting much lately — been busy working on the Beacon Hill Blog and other stuff, but one thing I have done a bunch of is riding our new Link light rail trains and using my new ORCA card to pay the fare. I was used to a similar card from our trip to England last year, where we used Oyster cards to pay fares for the Tube.

Oyster cards, as it turns out, are exactly the same size and shape as ORCA cards. And as with Oyster, you might find a need for a storage sleeve for your ORCA card. Sure, you can just put it in your wallet with your credit cards, and, depending on the wallet, sometimes you can even tap the card in without removing it. But then there are times when you have to show your ORCA to a fare inspector, or remove it to get it to tap, and it becomes necessary to keep your ORCA in something easily accessible and quick to find in a crowded purse or backpack, while also protecting the card from damage and wear. No one wants to be late for work and then find out that their ORCA won’t work because it’s bent and worn out from being tossed around a purse with your keys and stuff all the time.

In London, where they’ve used Oyster for several years now, Oyster card sleeves are a booming business. When you get your Oyster card, it comes with a plastic folding sleeve. Our Oyster sleeves last September were bright yellow, sponsored by IKEA, with an IKEA logo, and listing the four London-area IKEAs along with instructions of how to get there by transit — convenient! (This seems like a good way for ORCA to generate some advertising cash without selling advertising on the cards themselves: get local business to sponsor the sleeves.) Other businesses have sponsored giveaway Oyster sleeves. I particularly like this one from The Guardian newspaper and this one from skilljuice.com.

Along with the giveaway Oyster cases, however, you can buy tons of stylish or unusual Oyster sleeves from a variety of vendors, or even knit your own. You can get an Oyster case to suit just about any aesthetic or interest, and some even have added functionality — the London Transport Museum, for example, sells an Oyster sleeve with a map of the London Underground Network. The British Library has sleeves with the art of Olga Hirsch, and Tate Modern features the art of Orla Kiely. A search for “oyster card” on Etsy brings up a bunch of handmade, artsy card cases.

Lots of people use their Oyster card sleeves as their wallets, carrying not just their transit card, but also money, ID, and other stuff. (The sleeves generally have two pockets, one for the card and one for anything else you want to carry.)

Since Oyster card holders are the right size for ORCA cards, if you want your ORCA to be kept stylishly in a London Underground map Oyster sleeve, no problem. Perhaps eventually we’ll have some interesting local ORCA sleeves to choose from, but in the meantime, many of the UK sellers do ship them here. If you find an Oyster sleeve that expresses your personality, go for it. Or you can just keep it, along with all of your money and random stuff, in an old plastic card case like this.

While searching for something entirely different on Google Books (which is just about my favorite place on the Web these days), I stumbled on an issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, from 1886. The advertisements in it, for patent medicines, food, “sanitary appliances” and more, are fascinating. Here are a few:

Yes, “liquid meat” would make me want to “barff”, too.

Note “Coca.” As in “cocaine.” A “powerful nerve stimulant indeed!

Ah, stout. “Particularly suited for invalids, ladies nursing, or anyone requiring a good strengthening beverage.” It’s what the doctor ordered!

While working on the recent attempt to bake the 1930s Gold-N-Sno cake, Kristen and I were talking about how much fun it would be to make a blog of “resurrected recipes” — food that no one makes any more. The stuff that was commonplace for our grandparents, but is no longer in vogue. After all, even in our lifetimes, we’ve seen food preferences change pretty strongly. (When I was a kid, the bread aisle had multiple shelves of white Wonder bread and just a little bit of wheat bread. Now Wonder is gone, and if any of that squishy-style pure white bread remains at all, it’s only a few loaves at a time.)

So here it is: Resurrected Recipes. Both of us will contribute to the blog as we get a chance. Kristen’s computer is currently in the shop, though, so she might not get to post much for a bit.

Photo by litlnemo.

Well, I made the cake (with much help from Mina). It tastes amazing. However, as you can see here, it looks kind of goofy. Really goofy. There is a reason for this.

The reason it looks weird is that the recipe we had doesn’t make enough frosting to frost the whole cake! Next time, we’ll double the frosting part.

What we did was to take the custard filling that is supposed to be between the layers, and extend it around the bottom layer. There was plenty of custard to do that, since we only made a two layer cake instead of three. (Between the two of us we only had two 9″ cake pans and two 8″ cake pans. What is up with that?) It looks a little messy to have the custard around the outside like that — it’s wetter than the frosting. But it is heavenly.

Other notes: The batter is good. The cake is very light and has a wonderful orange flavor. (There is a little coconut in the batter but I didn’t really notice it much.) The custard filling is amazing, my favorite part of the cake. It is an orange curd, sort of. I want to put it in jars and then spread it on everything… pastries, bread, cookies…

The frosting is a boiled frosting, which I don’t think I’ve ever had before. It is a little different than the buttercream I’ve made in the past, and you have to work quickly once you start frosting the cake. The frosting here is basically the classic “7-minute Frosting” recipe, with some added citrus flavor.

I am going to edit the recipe post slightly to reflect what we learned while making this. Basically, though, I’d recommend this recipe to anyone who likes citrus, coconut, and cake. It is really wonderful stuff.

Yesterday I picked up a book at the library: Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food. I haven’t read too much of it yet, but I did see the ad, pictured here, from 1933, for the Betty Crocker Cake Naming Contest. The contest promised a $5,000 in cash prizes to winners who suggested a name for the cake pictured: “a light, fluffy, orange-flavored cake, three full 9-inch layers, with creamy orange filling and covered with luscious white icing and moist shredded cocoanut (sic). The layer cake itself also contains cocoanut.”

This caught my eye. I love coconut. I love orange cake. I must make this cake. Maybe for New Year’s. According to the book, the winning name for the cake was… Gold-N-Sno. Times must have been more innocent then, because to me, golden snow means the yellow snow you had better not eat. But the cake looks good, so I’ll make it anyway.

Sometimes it seems that every recipe ever written down has found its way onto the Web somewhere, so I figured I’d find the Gold-N-Sno cake — maybe spelled a little differently — with a quick Google search. How wrong I was.

I found a few vintage newspapers with Gold-N-Sno mentions — invariably in ads for bakeries who made this cake. The cake seems to have been relatively well-known. Here are a couple from Oswego, New York, in 1934 and 1939, and one from Sewickley, Pennsylvania in 1940 (please click to see the complete images):

But no recipes. (There is a site, newspaperarchive.com, which charges a hefty sum to look at their archived newspapers. The Gold-N-Sno cake is mentioned pretty frequently in newspapers there from the 1930s, but I cannot tell if the recipe is lurking there without paying them. Most of the examples there did also seem to be ads, though.)

I tried changing the spelling to “Gold-N-Snow”. I found a few more ads, from Cass City, Michigan, 1941 and 1942, and Oswego again in 1934 and 1940 (once again, please click to see the full images):

Still, no recipes. I still thought the recipe must probably be online somewhere, but someone must have changed the name. So I looked more closely at the ad pictured in Finding Betty Crocker. Underneath the picture of the cake, I saw that Betty Crocker ever-so-helpfully labeled every part of the cake, and listed all the ingredients. Thank you, Betty!

With arrows pointing to the various parts of the cake, I read “Cocoanut Icing,” “Oranges” (these are orange pieces arranged decoratively around the base of the cake), “Three Layer Orange Cake,” “Cocoanut in Cake,” and “Creamy Orange Filling.”

The ingredient list “for Cake, Filling and Icing” is: “Shortening, sugar, eggs, flour, salt, baking powder, orange juice, orange rind, cocoanut, corn starch, lemon juice.”

With all the ingredients, I ought to be able to find the recipe online somewhere, yes? And sure enough, it wasn’t long before I stumbled on the “Prize Orange Coconut Cake.” This recipe is all over the various web recipe collections. It seems to come from a single source, one with quite a few typos. It is unclear what that source may be. The ingredients match the list in the ad exactly, with the exception of corn syrup in the frosting, as does the construction of the cake. I think this is probably the once popular Gold-N-Sno. Here it is, with typos fixed and some editing to make it easier to read (I hope):

(Note: since I posted this, I have actually made the cake. See here for comments. I’ve edited a couple of things in this post, now that I’ve tried the cake.)

Prize Orange Coconut Cake (possibly the 1933 Gold-N-Sno cake)

Total quantities of ingredients you need to have on hand, if I’ve counted correctly (I rounded up a couple of times):

• 3/4 c shortening
• 4 3/4 c sugar
• Rind of two oranges
• 6 eggs (you’ll be using the yolks and the whites separately, so don’t throw any away)
• 3 1/2 c cake flour
• 4 1/2 tsp baking powder
• Slightly over a teaspoon of salt
• 1 1/2 c orange juice
• 1 c water
• 1 1/4 cup shredded coconut
• 4 T corn starch
• 1/4 c lemon juice
• 2 T butter
• 2 tsp corn syrup

Batter:

From the ingredients you’ve gathered for this recipe, take:

• 3/4 c shortening (I used Crisco Butter Flavor)
• 2 c sugar

Cream together, then add:

• 1 1/2 tsp grated orange rind (preferably organic)
• 2 egg yolks, well beaten

Blend together,then sift:

• 3 1/4 c cake flour, sift once (I used Softasilk)
• 4 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

Add sifted ingredients to first mixture with:

• 1/2 c orange juice
• 3/4 c water

Beat enough to make batter smooth. Blend in:

• 1/2 c moist, shredded coconut
• 4 egg whites, beaten to stiff peaks

Pour into three 9-inch cake pans, greased and floured.
Bake 30 minutes in moderate oven at 350 degrees F.
Cool completely on cooling rack before frosting.
Put the layers together with orange filling (see below) and cover with orange frosting (also below). Sprinkle with 3/4 cup moist shredded coconut.

Orange Filling:

• 2 level T flour
• 4 level T cornstarch
• 4 egg yolks, well beaten
• 1 c sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt

Mix until smooth in double boiler.
Add, slowly, the following, stirring constantly:

• 1/2 c orange juice
• 3 T lemon juice
• 1/4 c water

Then add:

• 2 T butter
• grated rind of 1 orange

Cook over water, stirring occasionally until thick, about 20 minutes. Cool. Spread between layers of cake. (Ours thickened a little more quickly than 20 minutes.) The result is sort of an orange curd; very orangey and good.

Orange Frosting:

(This is a variant on the 7-Minute Frosting boiled frosting recipe that can be found in many sources. You should wait until the cake is ready to frost before you make this, as it must be used immediately after cooking.)
IMPORTANT: When we made this, it did not make enough frosting to cover the whole cake. I recommend doubling this recipe. However, I have not yet tried it with the doubled amount so I can’t be sure the proportions wouldn’t need to be tweaked. So I’m leaving the original amount here for now.

• 1 tsp light corn syrup
• 7/8 c sugar
• 1/4 tsp grated orange rind
• 1 egg white
• 3 T orange juice

Put in double boiler.
Beat constantly with rotary beater while cooking over boiling water 6-7 minutes.
Remove from heat and add:

• 1/2 tsp lemon juice
• sprinkling of salt

Beat thoroughly for about 2 minutes until it’s a spreadable consistency, and then spread on cake immediately.

So. Is this the Gold-N-Sno cake from 1933? Anyone know? I think I will try it soon and see if I like it. I’d like to know if it’s the same cake, and if it’s good at all.

(Added later: Yes. It’s good. I think it is the same cake, too.)

Incidentally, while researching this, I found Kitty Wells’ Orange Coconut Cake, which is somewhat similar and apparently quite tasty.

One other thing — I noticed that a couple of those vintage bakery ads mentioned “malted milk” cakes. If there is any cake that sounds as good to me as orange-coconut, it is chocolate malted milk. Good God, I love chocolate malt flavor. That vintage recipe, at least, is easier to track down, and the results are apparently excellent. I can see I might have to make two cakes for New Year’s Eve.

A few months ago I wrote about the lovely reflector art installed on Martin Luther King Jr Way as part of the light rail project, and was thrilled when the artist himself replied to my post. So I am very sad today to hear that Richard Elliott, the reflector artist, died recently of pancreatic cancer. He mentioned “health issues” in his comment, but I had no idea.

My childhood home, now for sale

Me, Dave, and Kurt, on the front porch of the same house, February 1988

The house I grew up in, in Lake City, is for sale. My mom sold it a few years ago to a flipper who is asking what seems to me to be an outrageous amount of money for the place. He also tore out all the rose bushes.

It’s a nice little starter home, but it’s tiny. I mean tiny. Not “spacious.” And when they say “formal dining room” on the flyer, I laugh. You see that window next to the breakfast bar? That is the “dining room”, and it was tiny when we lived there, which was before they put the breakfast bar in.

The upstairs is remodeled now, which is an improvement. It was just a little attic cubbyhole room before. I wonder if they’ve done anything about the heat, though. The upstairs room had no heat to it when we lived there. I had a space heater.