Welcome to the wonderful world of Julia Cakes — lovely little vanilla tea cakes made moist with sour cream and baked in muffin tins or in small bread pans. Serve slices of the cake on a bed of our chilled Mango Custard or use our old-fashioned buttermilk frosting recipe to frost them vintage style. These little cuties will remind you of sunshine and all things yummy. But don’t forget the tea (or champagne)! 🙂

Food Writers’ Camp! Just stoked to be able to break away for the week-end to hang with food writers in a beautiful mountain setting. Just getting out of the city was a transformation!

What a fun getaway at Camp Blogaway (haha!). The classes were awesome! The sponsors were amazing. I learned skills in: photography, recipe writing, food styling, food prep and, of course, I learned to taste specialty foods and wine. heh heh~~! The sponsors were incredible and included: Cutco Cutlery, Melissa’s Farm Fresh Produce, North Denver Sausage, Wente Vineyards, KerryGold, The National Honey Board and The National Mango Board , Gourmet Garden , Idaho Potato Commission and Paper Chef — just to name a few.

It was so fun to be up in the mountains for early morning nature walks and nighttime fireplace cozy-up chats!

Here I am (on the left) being trained by the National Mango Board on how to cut and slice a pile of incredible mangoes. So easy when someone shows you how!

Here’s the handsome knife I was using from Cutco Cutlery (it stays sharp forever cause they sharpen it for free for the life of the knife). Disclosure: Cutco gave all the food writers a knife to take home (wow!) but I had a set at home so I was a “believer” before the gracious gift. 🙂 They’re awesome kitchen tools!

The National Mango Board set up taste testing samples for us to try with sweet and savory methods of preparing mangoes at unripe, ripe and very ripe stages. I thought the testing tray was loverly…

And the Mango folks sent every food writer from camp a box of fresh mangoes! whoo hoo! Aren’t they pretty on my doorstep? I gave one to the UPS guy when he came running back to my porch to find out why I was hollering…It was a joyful whoop-dee-do holler. 🙂

Now its time for Cake! We’ve been on the hunt for the perfect moist homemade cake to pair with mango custard and I think we’ve found it in a charming vintage cook book (condensed American version of 1936) from Sweden called “The Princesses Cook Book” by Jenny Akerstrom (you can see it gets good use). The author had a famous school of domestic science for girls in Stockholm and was the author of many popular cooking books in the 30’s. 🙂

And we landed on this cute recipe for “Julia’s Cup Cakes”! That’s not Julia Child but more likely Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands — which would be Juliana Louise Emma Marie Wilhelmina (1909–2004), the only child of Queen Wilhelmina. But I’m not sure about this — so let me know if you have a better guess about the namesake for our little cakes. 🙂

It’s a simple recipe made moist with sour cream. We had to increase the quantities of ingredients and we added fine quality vanilla extract but mostly we left the recipe pristine during the 3 tests we baked for this post. 🙂

Size DOES matter! Bake these cakes super mini, medium or kinda small in a mini muffin tin, a regular sized muffin tin or small bread pans. You could also whip up one of these babies in Bake And Give Wooden Bakers from our sponsor King Arthur Flour. I think they’re SO cute (course you could fill them higher (batter half full is a good choice for a less dainty cake slice). 🙂

Tools Needed:
Butter or cooking spray or paper liners
12 or 24-cup Muffin tin or 11″ x 2.5 x 5.2 inch bread pan or two 7″ x 2-1/2 pans
Small cup or bowl (for warming eggs to room temp)
2 large mixing bowls (for dry ingredients & batter)
Whisk
Spatula
Electric mixer
Measuring cups and spoons

Ingredients:
2 large eggs
1/3 cut butter, unsalted
1-1/4 cups granulated sugar
2/3 cup sour cream
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract, fine quality

Okay, get out your vintage tea cups and let’s have a tea cakes baking party!

Julia Cakes Directions:

Set your oven rack to center position and pre-heat oven to 350.

If you’re using muffin tins, smear them with butter or line them with paper.
Disclosure: We tested these awesome parchment cups for Paper Chef — and they worked wonderfully! They left no “wax” on the cake and they pull away nicely after baking.

We’re also testing Bake and Give WOOD baking pans for King Arthur Flour. They’re too cute for words! Measuring in at 7″ x 2-1/2 inches tall, they come lined with paper and they bake in the oven and then they become darling instant cake gifts from the kitchen. haha! No more lost bread pans never returned to sender. 😀

Egg warmer tip-o-the-day! Warm em up before before beating them up and your cake will rise higher and maybe even become a fluffier wonderland. Just place your cold eggs in a cup or bowl of warm water while you prep for your kitchen project. Give em 5 minutes to take the chill off instead of waiting around all day (or at least 20 minutes) with eggs on the counter coming to room temp. 😀

Melt in the microwave (but not hot) and set aside:
1/3 cup unsalted butter

In an electric blender, beat until creamy (about 3 minutes on high-speed):
1-1/4 cups granulated sugar
prepared room temperature eggs

Tip: The creamed butter-sugar mixture should be creamy and lightened to a pale color.

Bring to room temperature in the microwave for a few seconds (just take off the chill):
2/3 cup sour cream

Beat into the creamed butter-sugar mixture on medium-speed for about 1 minute:
the room temperature sour cream

Now let’s gather up our dry goods. 😀

Place the following dry ingredients in a medium-sized mixing bowl:
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt

Whisk together the dry ingredients until fully incorporated (too lazy to sift). 🙂

Add the dry ingredients to the batter and beat on low-speed until just blended no more than 1 minute in the mixer at this stage if possible.

Pour the melted room temperature butter on the top of the batter and, using a spatula, fold the butter thorough into the batter.

Using a spatula, fold into the batter:
2 teaspoons vanilla extract, fine quality

I used an ice cream scooper for the batter to fill the muffin tins half full.

The batter is somewhat thick so smooth out the top of the batter.

Pop them in the oven at 350 for between 10 minutes for mini cakes up to 20 minutes for muffin-sized cakes.

If you’re baking a tea cake in a small bread pan, pop the in the oven at 350 for about 30 to 35 minutes until lightly golden brown on top, with a toothpick coming out clean.

The cake has the consistency of a light pound cake.

Our testers rated it A+ as a tea cake without frosting but we want to ratchet that up a tad.

*****Now on to the mango custard sauce!*****

From the White House Cook Book “Cream For Fruit” recipe! (1887), printed 1899, modified a wicked bit to thicken it slightly and then adding in one pureed fresh mango for some pizazz!

Here’s how we tested the very last bites of Julia Cakes with Mango Custard… 🙂

Tools for Mango Custard:
1 Small sauce pot
Fork or Whisk
Food Processor or blender (we used a mini food processor)
Soup-sized bowl
Measuring Cups & Spoons

Ingredients for Mango Custard Sauce:
2 teaspoons unsalted butter (or…”a piece of butter the size of a nutmeg”) 🙂
2 egg whites (from large eggs, no yolks)
1 cup milk (we used 2%)
2 teaspoons corn starch
1 Tablespoon sugar

We’ll start with room temperature butter.

Set out on the counter or nukerize for a few seconds in the microwave:
2 teaspoons unsalted butter

Separate whites and yolks and set out to come to room temperature:
2 egg whites (using large-sized eggs)

In a small sauce pot on low to medium-low heat, combine and stir well to dissolve any trace of lumps:
1 cup milk (we used 2%)
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 Tablespoon sugar
prepared room temperature butter

Add slowly to the mixture while stirring briskly:
the 2 egg whites

Cook over low heat, stirring to prevent lumping, about 5 minutes.
Tip: According to the original recipe, you should not let this concoction boil. So let’s follow that rule to make a perfect creamy sauce.

Remove the sauce when it begins to thicken to the consistency of a light pudding.

Stirring Tip: As it cools on the counter, you MUST stir it from time to time to prevent lumping. (At the worst, you can strain out any lumps but if you keep it stirred during the cooling process, you should be fine.)

Cut off the sides and scoop out the fruit of:
1 large fresh mango

If you want to dice it first, watch this video on how to slice and dice a gorgeous hunk of tropical fruit.

Puree the mango fruit in a mini blender or mash to a fine puree.

In a soup-sized bowl, combine the white custard and the mango puree and refrigerate.

Now you have a lovely custard sauce. If the sauce consistency changes over time, you can just whip it into shape by stirring it vigorously with a fork. If you want it thinner, add a touch of cream. If you want it thicker, chill it a little longer

Now find an old flowered dessert plate, spoon a circle of mango custard sauce over the center and set your darling slice of cake right on top of the custard. Yo! Goodness gracious, its tea time now!

You can also frost the cupcakes style cake with an amazing cooked custard frosting called heirloom frosting.  You can add fruit to this frosting custard, like pureed banana or strawberry jam or peach jam.

I hope you’ll let me know what you think of this recipe (or any of our vintage cake recipes) and let me know what’s on your wish list for an upcoming vintage cake recipe.

It’s so fun to hear from you!

And don’t forget to send in tea party photos (my favorite!)…

Hope you’re following us on Facebook, Pinterest! 😀

Happy vintage baking!

Leslie

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