Martha Washington’s Great Cake
This recipe is from the Washington home at Mount Vernon, Virginia where Mrs. Washington’s cake is on display at Christmastime. The original cake recipe below was one of her favorite recipes.
Martha Washington’s Great Cake
(from Mount Vernon)Take 40 eggs and divide the whites from the yolks and beat them to a froth. Then work 4 pounds of butter to a cream and put the whites of eggs to it a Spoon full at a time till it is well work’d. Then put 4 pounds of sugar finely powdered to it in the same manner then put in the Yolks of eggs and 5 pounds of flour and 5 pounds of fruit. 2 hours will bake it. Add to it half an ounce of mace and nutmeg half a pint of wine and some fresh brandy.
The curatorial staff at Mount Vernon notes that when they made Mrs. Washington’s cake they followed her recipe “almost” exactly. For the five pounds of fruit, they used two pounds of raisins, one pound of currants, and two pounds of apples. They used cream sherry for the wine. Martha Washington baked her famous cake in one layer, however there is no pan now at Mount Vernon large enough to hold all of the batter, therefore the staff baked the batter in two 14 inch layers and afterwards stacked them. A 350 degree oven was used for 1 1/2 hours. The resulting cake was iced with a very stiff egg-white based frosting flavored with rosewater or orange-flower water.
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This kinda sounds like a cake my grandmother used to make us for VERY special occasions. I’m going to try this with her version of a topping. We lost the recipe 20 years ago. The frosting was gooey and sprinkled with cocoa powder. It was THE best cake in the world and we would have to beg and cajole for a long time to get her to relent and make the wonderful concoction.
Thank you for posting
Comment by Victoria — June 3, 2008 @ 4:38 am