< Previous page

As I hunted for my grandmother's Porcupine cake recipe, I began looking for her as well. I searched online for the record of her entry at Ellis Island. I paged through her prayer book. I called my relatives for their memories.

This what I have learned: She put up a bushel of peaches and did the ironing on the same day she gave birth to her fourth child. She had her hair done and did her washing every Monday. If her grandchildren left any yolk on their plates when they finished eating the eggs over-easy that she had prepared, she would scrape it off, scramble it and re-serve it to them. She kept an immaculate house -- clean baseboards, polished attic steps -- and she had semi-gloss on every painted surface in her house because it was easier to clean.

"I see this parallel between the cake and her personality," says my brother Tony. "Just like this cake was so carefully put together, so was she, so were her surroundings."

Tony's 18th birthday in 1979 was likely the last occasion for which Grandma made the Porcupine cake.

Getting tantalizingly closer

My aunt, Margaret Cronin, my father's only living sister, may have the recipe, but my first efforts to reach her were unsuccessful. I searched the Internet but found only cakes shaped like porcupines and hedgehogs. A post on eGullet, an online food discussion board, got me nowhere.

I called Marlene Parish, a culinary historian and food journalist in Pittsburgh. She called the Pittsburgh Regional History Center, hoping the Porcupine cake may have been common to the area's card-party circuit in the first half of the century. No such luck. Greg Patent, author of "A Baker's Odyssey: Celebrating Time-honored Recipes from America's Rich Immigrant Heritage," told me, "I never heard of anything like that." Erin Williams, the collections manager at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, also found a hedgehog-shaped cake.

Then I contacted Jean Anderson, a cookbook maven who lives in Chapel Hill and is author of "The New German Cookbook," among many others. She suggested the Prince Regent's Torte, a 10-layer cake with apricot marmalade and buttercream frosting between each layer, as being a recipe my grandmother may have adapted. Anderson sent me the recipe but warned me about making almond brittle in wet weather: "You'll have no end of problems."

She was right.

When you bring a cooking question to Anderson, she takes it on as her own. When baking expert Nick Malgieri came to town a few weeks later, Anderson asked him if he had ever heard of a Porcupine cake. He had not but wondered if my grandmother adapted the recipe from a Hungarian cake called a Dobos Torte, a five- or more layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting. With both cakes, the sponge cake layers are baked individually and baking powder is not used.

I called my father, excited that either of these cakes could be the basis for the Porcupine cake. He dismissed the idea. He says Grandma made three cakes and cut each in thirds, which likely means the cakes were sturdier than sponge cakes and the recipes called for baking powder.

And so, I settled on a basic yellow cake with American buttercream frosting, each flavored with almond extract. I soon learned I do not possess the skill to cut one cake in thirds. The best I can do is cut four cakes in half. My fourth attempt resulted in eight crooked layers and a cake that leaned to one side. I found a solution on my fifth try, using an embroidery hoop as a level and cutting the layers with a 10-inch bread knife. But this spring's rainy weather has made making almond brittle impossible. I came close, but I'm not sure I nailed it.

Finally last week, I got my Aunt Margaret on the phone. She thinks she has the recipe but hasn't been able to locate it. If she does find it, she warns the recipe is probably in German. Her memory differs a bit from my father's. She recalls a coffee flavor, slivered almonds sticking straight out from the sides of the cake and no brittle.

Aunt Margaret tried to make the cake once. "I swore I'd never do it again," she says.

I will try again. If I inherited a morsel of my grandmother's baking ability, I inherited all of her stubbornness.

< Previous page