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Easy Heart Shaped Cake

This heart-shaped cake requires simple ingredients like fresh eggs, cake flour, real butter, and love. The finished cake will be close to 13 inches across when assembled, so it is best to build it on a large foil-wrapped surface. I foil-wrapped the lid of a storage box. I served this cake at my mother-in-law's 94th birthday party. In an attempt to honour her 94 years, I placed nine candles around the perimeter and a line of four down the middle. It looked great, and the boy from the Get a Bigger Wagon books, my husband, said it was delicious. 

This cake is best iced with my favourite brown sugar seven-minute frosting. The recipe is easy, fail-proof, safe (no raw egg whites), and delicious.

Making this cake, complete with icing, will leave you with 6 egg yolks. There are many ways to use egg yolks, creatively. My husband, the boy from the Get a Bigger Wagon stories, loves homemade butterscotch pudding, which calls for four yolks.  

Easy Heart Cake

Preheat the oven to 350ºF

Cake Ingredients:

½ cup of soft butter

1½ cups of sugar

2½ cups sifted cake flour

2½ teaspoons of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

1 cup of milk

1½ teaspoons of vanilla

4 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Method:

Grease and flour one 8-inch round pan and one 8 x 8 x 2-inch square pan.

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy.

Sift dry ingredients together and add to creamed mixture alternately with milk and vanilla.

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Divide the batter between the prepared pans and bake for 30 to 35 minutes. Cool. Remove cakes from pans.

To Assemble:

Cut the 8-inch round cake in half. You can make an 8-inch wax paper circle, fold it in half, and lay it on the cake, to provide a guideline.     

Put the cut sides of the eight-inch round cake next to two adjoining sides of the square cake, creating a heart. Ice with pink frosting and decorate.

Brown Sugar Seven-minute Frosting

My mother believed this icing could make any cake special, even a mix.

Ingredients:

1 cup of brown sugar

1 egg white

2 tablespoons of water (Plus a few drops of colouring, if desired)

Pinch of salt

Have ½ a teaspoon vanilla and ¼ teaspoon of baking powder ready to add when the icing is cooked. Add a few drops of red food colouring to the cooked icing to achieve a soft pink shade.  

To Prepare:

Put brown sugar, egg white, water, and salt into the top of a double boiler over boiling water and beat the icing with a rotary beater until stiff. This will take almost seven minutes.The icing is ready when it will form stiff peaks. When taken off the heat, add the ½ teaspoon of vanilla and the ¼ teaspoon of baking powder.

I usually double this recipe. A double recipe will generously cover the top and sides of a layer cake that is filled with something else. The leftovers will cover an 8-inch square cake on top and sides.

I often ice the cake the night before, and, if refrigerated, the icing keeps very nicely. It almost seems to improve with the extra day.

It's easiest to slice the two halves of the round cake first. 

As I mentioned, If you make the heart cake with the double recipe of my favourite frosting, you will have 6 egg yolks remaining. I suggest you use four of them in the Boy's Favourite Butterscotch Pudding. 

My mother kept clipped recipes in scrapbooks. This one dates back to the late 1950s.