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Family recipe for white layer cake 🎂

Context

This recipe was in the cookbook that my Grandma Piper customized for me. This is apparently the cake that the Piper family always made for weddings (so my great-grandma’s recipe on my Grandpa’s side, I think), and my Grandma made it for birthday parties. I made this for the first time last week for B’s birthday party on the weekend.

It results in an exceptionally smooth batter, it almost feels a bit too fancy for a kid’s party. But it’s a lovely cake! It also stored well double-wrapped in the fridge for a few days before I iced it. I haven’t tried freezing this cake, but I think it would probably work nicely.

Grandma would have always used her KitchenAid, but it was no problem making this with handheld electric beaters. Her recipe didn’t specify salted or unsalted butter. I used salted and quite liked it. Likewise it didn’t specify the sugar. I’m almost certain she would have used granulated, but I used caster which worked fabulously. If you use caster, just make sure to go with the weight measurement, not cups.

Apparently this recipe makes 3 dozen cupcakes and you have to bake those for 25 minutes. But I’ve never tried it, and there is no more instruction from her on that.

Goes well with this classic white frosting recipe.

  1. Preheat the oven to 325F (165C).
  2. In a KitchenAid, or in a large bowl using electric hand beaters, cream together ⅔ c (150 g) butter and 2 c (400 g) granulated sugar until very smooth. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract and beat until smooth.
  3. In a separate bowl, sift together 3 c (360 g) cake flour and 1 tbsp baking powder.
  4. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture in to the butter mixture alternating with 1½ c milk, blending after each addition. Do not overbeat.
  5. Butter and flour two eight-inch cake pans.
  6. In a separate bowl, beat together 4 egg whites until stiff but moist. Make sure that the beaters and bowl are very clean, any fat will prevent the egg whites from frothing up nicely.
  7. Fold the beaten egg whites in to the rest of the batter using a large metal spoon.
  8. Pour in equal parts in to your two prepared layer pans. Then bake at 325F (165C) for 10 minutes, and 25 minutes at 350F (175C).
  9. When done*, remove from the oven and let cool in their tins for about 10 minutes. Turn the layers out on to a cooling rack, and let cool completely before icing the layers or double-wrapping in cling film to refrigerate or freeze them. If storing, try to store them side-by-side to preserve height.

* This cake is sort of hard to tell when it’s done. When done, it will have picked up a little bit of color on top and should pull away from the sides of the pan slightly. If you listen to it you shouldn’t hear much crackling, and if you very lightly press the top, it shouldn’t feel like you pop too many bubbles.

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Why can’t you show AM/PM time on an iPhone?

So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue.

My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well for his age. The only thing he’s having trouble with is short-term memory. This usually isn’t a big enough problem to cause any major concern at the moment. Although he lives on his own, it’s in an apartment that is equipped for his needs within an assisted living building, and my parents aren’t too far from him.

The thing that is causing problems, pretty major problems, is when he takes a nap and then wakes up and thinks it’s the wrong time of day. This causes him to miss meals because he doesn’t go down to the dining room in time. And when older folks start to regularly miss meals, they get pretty weak pretty fast.

He doesn’t want to cause a fuss, so we don’t know exactly how often this happens. I imagine with other folks, it also might be a bit embarrassing (maybe it is for him as well, I’m not sure). He naps a lot, which is fair enough considering his age, so I suspect it might be more often than we think.

I was talking about this with my mom, asking him if he has a big digital clock in his apartment or something. He does have a clock, but he usually looks at his watch or his phone for the time. I don’t want to suggest that he wear a digital watch, because his watch came from my grandma. So we were looking at our phones, and she pointed out that there’s no AM/PM.

There’s no way of changing it! That seems ludicrous.

I know he could change it to 24-hr time. But I doubt he would do that, because he would probably convince himself that it’s fine and he doesn’t need it. It would be a heck of a lot easier if you could just show AM/PM via the iOS Date & Time settings, as one would expect.

If any Apple folks happen to read this, I’d love if you could take this feedback onboard in some way. Or if you happen to know anyone at Apple, I’d really appreciate if you shared this with them.

In the meantime… I guess we get him a bigger digital clock for his apartment? I’m really not sure.

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“How high were the bunks?” “Oh, probably about the length of your forearm.”

Grandpa showed me the album of his WWII photos and postcards when I got to see him at Christmas. I didn’t know it existed.

Grandpa couldn’t bring his camera with him when he was deployed, it would have been confiscated during inspection. Luckily his friend Renee Neuman brought his box camera when he came back from leave, so Grandpa got to borrow that sometimes. They developed the photos in soup bowls. He said that Neuman unfortunately passed about 5 years after returning from the war. I asked about the cause, but he said he wasn’t sure.

The photos here are all positioned in order on a single page captioned “Diving for movie film in 40 ft of water”. Grandpa laughed when describing it.

Their LST ran aground in Pearl Harbor, so they had to stay there for repairs. While there, another ship came along and they exchanged 35mm films. Unfortunately the film from the other ship fell in to the harbour. It wasn’t financially valuable, but very valuable in terms of morale so they asked tower to send a diver to recover the movie. The diver wasn’t happy, he had been at a party, but he did recover the film.

Most of the photos in the album are of Grandpa and the others from his ship doing jobs here and there or “just horsing around” as he said. There was a lot of down time. There are a few landscapes of Hawaii, Guam, the Kwajalein Atoll, and the Enewetak Atoll. Some are in the aftermath of a tsunami. There were also some intense images towards the end of the album, hard to tell if they were photos or postcards. Some would be pretty gruesome for postcards, others were of the signing of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. At any rate, Grandpa said he hadn’t taken those final album images. He developed a bunch of negatives for other people, so if these weren’t postcards then they may have been copies of others’ photographs.

There were two photos of a large cemetery in Guam with many small Christian grave markers. Grandpa had gone to school with one of the men buried there, he and Grandma had gone to senior prom with this boy and his date. After graduation, he went in to the Marines and was killed. Grandpa took photos of the grave for the man’s family.

Grandpa carried a pocket-sized spiral bound photo album with him throughout WWII filled with photos of family and friends, but mostly of Grandma. It’s very worn apart now. The sleeve with the photo of Grandma and him in his uniform also includes a pressed four leaf clover and a Japanese stamp.

In the back of the main album, there was originally a college photo of Grandma with a gardenia behind her ear. That’s on the wall of his apartment now, with other family photos.