Cakewalk
Driving home from the picnic on Saturday, I happened to mention to A. (he came along too, and was a servant, holding gloves and mantles for the Hon. Gents.) that it was my mother's seventieth birthday this coming weekend.

"You should drive up for her birthday," he said, which struck me as a decent wheeze.

"I could," I said. "I could call my brother, and he could come too. You wouldn't come?"

"No, it's my mom's birthday too, remember, and who would look after the dog?" (His mother's birthday is the day before mine, and my parents' cat is too old and infirm to put up with a rambunctious dog.) "Plus, I could get some more work done on the bathroom." (Ah, the bathroom! Soldering and plumbing has been ongoing, and frustrating. First, the cold water pipe sprang a leak two days after A. and his friend installed it. Then, when the friend came over yesterday to try and fix the leak, the fixture broke. Yes, the expensive, Victorian-style faucet set purchased years ago (when we first knew we'd need to redo the bathroom one day) cracked irreparably, and it's much too late now to ask about warranties; they would laugh.)

I called my brother that very evening, and he thought it was a splendid idea. Then, knowing my mother, I thought it best not to spring it on her. I called her Saturday, brought her up to date on my lavatory woes, and then asked if she was doing anything special for her birthday.

"Special? No! Why would I want to do that?"

So she would not object if my brother and I showed up on the doorstep Friday night?

"What? But I was going to have a nice peaceful birthday, watch the American Open, order pizza -- now I have to clean the house, cook, make a cake --"

"No you don't. Order pizza, the house is fine, I'll bake a cake and bring it."

"What! You can't do that!"

"Course I can. I'll freeze it."

"What kind of cake?"

"I thought maybe an Opera, or a Prinzregententorte."

"That won't freeze! Anyway, you're not going to bring that all the way in the car."

"Course it'll freeze. All those fancy cakes they sell in stores, all frozen at some point. No problem. I'll pack it up frozen, it'll be fine."

"I hope it's going to be a real cake. With butter."

"I'll use my Dr. Oetker recipe. Same as yours."

"Well, it won't make as many layers as they say."

It did, though. In fact, it made nine. I called my mother again, to tell her that the cake had been successfully made and installed in the freezer to get solid, and she didn't believe me. She had to get her book, compare recipes... "I don't know how you got nine! I never get enough batter!" The recipes were identical.

Then I told her I'd decorated it with buttercream.

"What! That's not a real Prinzregententorte! It never has anything on the outside! Just the chocolate."

(I've found a multitude of recipes, just looking around, including one with apricot jam in it -- "They never have jam in them, either.") But I post a picture, herewith, from my Dr. Oetker cookbook, with buttercream decorations. Just to show that this wasn't purely my iconoclastic impulses ruining a traditional torte. Because there is only ever one right way of doing something, even something as susceptible to evolution and alteration as a cake recipe. Forsooth, even the famed Sachertorte is disputed.

Prince Regent Cake
Oetker German Home Baking, p. 25
Cake mixture
250g butter or margarine
250g sugar
1 packet Oetker Vanillin Sugar
4 eggs
a pinch of salt
200g plain flour
50g Oetker Gustin (corn starch powder)
1 level tsp. (3g) Oetker Baking Powder Backin

Butter Cream Filling:
1 packet Oetker Gala Chocolate Pudding Powder
1 level tsp. cocoa
100g sugar
5 tbsp cold milk
50g coconut butter (optional)
3/4 pt/ 425ccm milk
250g butter or margarine

Icing:
150g icing sugar
3 level tbsp cocoa
2-3 tbsp hot water
20g butter or coconut butter, melted

For the cake mixture, cream the fat and add to it the sugar, vanillin sugar, eggs and salt. Mix and sieve together the flour, Gustin and Backin and add to the creamed ingredients, a tablespoon at a time. Bake 8 separate layers out of the mixture. Spread almost 2 tbsp of mixture each time on the base of a well greased round cake tin (with removable rim and of 10? in. diameter). Take care that the mixture is not too thin near the edge as it might become brown. Bake each layer without the cake tin rim until golden. Cool each layer on a cake wire after baking.
Oven: moderately hot.
Baking time: about 8-10 minutes.
For the filling, blend the pudding powder, cocoa, and the sugar with the 5 tbsp. milk. Bring the 3/4 pt. milk to the boil, remove from heat, stir in the pudding powder mixture and bring to the boil once more, stirring all the time. If coconut butter is used, add this to the hot pudding. Set aside to cool, stirring frequently to prevent a skin forming.
Cream the fat and beat in the cold pudding gradually (take care that neither pudding nor fat are too cool or the butter cream may curdle). Spread each layer with the filling and place on top of one another to build the cake, the top layer being without filling.
For the icing, sieve the icing sugar with the cocoa and add sufficient hot water to give a good coating consistency. Add the hot fat and ice the cake.

Notes: I used 2 tablespoons vanilla sugar, since I don't have packets, but a jar of sugar and vanilla beans, and that sounded good to me. I also used arrowroot in place of the cornstarch, since I had used all my cornstarch making the pudding for the filling mere moments before. (And a good thing too. Labour Day, no place to buy cornstarch, and while you can interchange one for the other pretty freely in a cake or cookie, an arrowroot custard is quite a different -- and worse -- thing from a cornstarch one.

The instructions are, to my mind, a little sparse. I creamed the butter, added the sugar, and creamed all together for three minutes. Then the eggs, one at a time, creaming between each addition, and the flour as noted, a tablespoon at a time. There was lots of batter.

Their instructions to use 2 tablespoons of mixture at a time are cracked; I used not quite a quarter cup. Spread it out just like peanut butter right across the base of my 10" springform. Once I got the hang of it, it was easy, and after the first couple, I figured how to release them, too, so that I could flip the thing, plop it down on waxed paper on the cake rack, and the disk of cake would fall right out. What they call a "moderately hot" oven, by the way, is "340?-390?F", which of course is the standard 350?.

I didn't use the filling or frosting instructions at all; I used the custard buttercream recipe out of The Village Baker's Wife, by Gayle and Joe Ortiz. Only I added 3 tablespoons Valrhona cocoa and 4 ounces grated chocolate to the custard. For the icing, a simple chocolate ganache: 8 ounces of semi-sweet Lindt, 3/4 of a cup of heavy cream, and 2 tablespoons of corn syrup because I intended to freeze the stuff.

It went together like anything, very pretty. I sprinkled the top with gold-leaf dust, piped on my sacreligious buttercream curls, and wedged an extra-thin Lindt chocolate square into each one -- so it's quite like the picture. I hope it doesn't get squished in the wrapping! I'll buy a cake-box for it tonight.

I hope my mother likes it. Well, I hope she enjoys it. It's quite conceivable that the more things she can find wrong with it, the more she will enjoy it, in a way...