Black Walnut Cake

Remember the black walnuts I harvested from our yard?  Today I finally got around to baking a black walnut cake.  I used a recipe my mother had clipped out of the Nashville Tennessean years ago.  The kids rolled in from college this afternoon, just in time to try it.  So far, the cake has gotten a mixed reaction.  One thumbs up (me!), one thumbs down, one thumb kinda sideways.

We decided to forego the butter cream cheese frosting, which might make a big difference in the whole experience, but at our house we tend to like naked cakes.  When a cake is left unfrosted, it offers more options.  You can eat it for breakfast, dessert, with ice cream, or, as my husband sometimes does, in a bowl with milk poured on it (that is just wrong!).

I remember the first time I had cake for breakfast.  I was ten years old.  My father was about to retire from the army and we were staying in transit billets in Germany, waiting for our flight back to the U.S. after a year in Ludwigsburg.  I guess there wasn't much in the way of kitchen facilities, but there was a kind of vending machine that sold chocolate and yellow marble cake slices.  My mother let us eat the cake for breakfast.  A new tradition was born!

Black Walnut Cake
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cups butter or shortening or half of each
3 eggs, separated
2 cups flour (I replaced about 1/3 cup with whole wheat)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup milk (recipe calls for whole, but I used 2%)
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup chopped black walnuts
Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan; set aside.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream sugar and butter/shortening until light and fluffy.  Add egg yolks to mixture and beat until well blended.
In separate bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder.  Add alternately with milk to the sugar mixture.  Mix in vanilla and chopped black walnuts.
Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry; fold into the batter with a rubber spatula.

batter ready for egg whites to be incorporated and batter ready to go into the oven

Pour into prepared pan and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean and center of cake springs back when touched lightly with your finger. 

Cool in pan on cooling rack 10 minutes.  Loosen edges with knife.  Remove from pan.

Black walnuts have a strong flavor, so this cake wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but it's something different and a good use for those walnuts that litter my yard every autumn!

Urban Farmer

I grew up in the country outside Nashville.  My folks had a large garden where we grew corn, potatoes, green beans, October beans, lima beans, squash, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and, some years, watermelons.  It was a large garden.  It was hard work, mostly for my parents who both had full-time jobs, but my brother and I had to help out.

 

We moved to that property when I was ten years old.  My parents had bought eleven acres from my Great Aunt Josie years before.  When my father retired from the army, they cleared out the old rundown farmhouse and landscaping and built a sprawling ranch house, planted trees, rhododendrons, and flowers, and started a big, wonderful garden.  In the early years of the garden, my brother and I were sent out with coffee cans to pick up rocks that turned up, endlessly it seemed, in the tilling.  We were put on weed pulling duty, too.  Johnson grass was our nemesis.  We also helped with the picking and “putting up.”  Which means we strung and broke up green beans, husked corn, and shelled lima beans until our thumbs were sore.  There was one job I could never do, though, and that was to pull the hornworms off the tomato plants.  Ewww!

My dad and daughter in the garden in early summer 1993

Growing up, I didn’t realize what a treasure it was to have a bountiful garden and really fresh produce.  Lots of people we knew had big gardens.  In late summer, for example, my aunt’s glasses would be speckled with corn “milk” from cutting corn off the cob in preparation for freezing.  For years now, ever since my parents moved into a senior condo, I’ve missed that garden.  The home canned tomatoes, the corn frozen on the day it was picked.  I try in my little yard to recreate what I can of that life.  I grow a few pots of tomatoes and herbs.  But, of course, it’s not at all the same.

The one thing I do have which is just like “home,” is walnuts.  Lots and lots of black walnuts.  My parents’ yard had an enormous, perfectly shaped, fabulous old walnut tree down by the road.  Kids would stop and rest under it as they walked back from the little market up the way.  In December, people would surreptitiously knock out the mistletoe that grew high up the branches.  It produced lots of walnuts.  My dad says he remembers one year hauling seven heaping wheelbarrows of walnuts down to the woods to dump.  We did mostly just dump our walnuts in the woods.  But some years, my brother and I would get a hammer, crack open some nuts and pry out the meat with a nail.

One of our walnut trees

Here at our house, we have five walnut trees around our yard.  Which is why I can’t really grow anything else, and have to grow my tomatoes in pots.  This year we have a bumper crop of walnuts, so I decided to harvest some.  Last time the daughter was home, we donned latex medical gloves and started husking.  (When we finished, we realized that the gloves leaked.  We now had badly stained fingertips and nails.  Not attractive.  And virtually impossible to remove.  After sugar scrubs, salt scrubs, orange goop, fingernail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide and a pumice stone, I still have some discoloration ten days later.)

Next we washed the nuts off a few times and set the pan out in the sun.  I covered the pan with a window screen to keep the squirrels from stealing our bounty.  That evening, I brought the pan in and left it on our enclosed back porch for nine days.  I should probably have waited longer, but I am not always a good waiter.  

Yesterday I got cracking.  After literally hours of cracking and picking out, I had four cups of nutmeats.  I felt like a real hunter/gatherer.  Well, at least a gatherer.  The nuts are so fragrant!  I plan to make a black walnut cake.  I’ll let you know if it turns out.