A Cake fit for a King

As a surprise for her birthday, I made lille sis a birthday cake.  But not just any birthday cake, a favourite from our past:  King Frederick the Eighth cake!

My mom found the recipe in a Søndags BT magazine during the 1970’s.

It was an immediate hit with sis and I.  Sugary, buttery goodness covered in butter crunch, the kind of thing we just didn’t get on a regular basis.  We were strictly leverpostej and rugbrød kinda people.

Archival Cake?

I had a very old paper copy of the recipe at home but I was a work and wanted to look at the ingredients list.  The obvious thing for me to do was go to the Søndags BT website and find the recipe.  No luck.  So over the the Karoline’s Køkken site.  Also, no luck.

Then I threw the query out to the world wide web.  Nothing!  How could that be???  Isn’t everything on the web?

It occurred to me that perhaps our Frederick VIII recipe was so old that it belonged in a museum.  Well, that isn’t going to happen.  This cake is too good to languish in a culinary archive.  So, here is the recipe, in all it’s buttery, sugary, nougatty goodness.

Enjoy!

Frederik VIII’s Cake

Cake

125 gm sugar

125 g butter

4 egg yolks

100 gm potato flour

100 gm pastry flour

2 tsp baking powder

4 egg whites

Butter Cream

200 gm unsalted butter

200 gm icing sugar

1 egg yolk

1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Nougat

200 g sugar

50 gm almonds

5 gm butter

Mix the softened butter with the sugar and add the egg yolks one at a time.

Mix the pastry flour, potato flour and baking powder together and then stir the mix into the butter and sugar.

White the egg whites until stiff and then stir them into the cake batter.

Pour the batter into a well-greased bundt form and bake for 25 minutes at 175 C or 350 F.

Let the cake rest in the pan for 10 minutes before turning it out onto a rack to cool.

When the cake is cool, cut it into 2 or 3 rings. Spread butter cream between the layers and re-assemble the cake. Spread the remaining butter cream all over the cake. Sprinkle the nougat on top of the cake.

Butter Cream

Blend the softened butter with sifted icing sugar, egg yolk and vanilla sugar. (To make a softer icing, omit the yolk and blend in 2 tbsp heavy whipping cream).

Nougat

Melt the sugar in a pan. When it becomes golden, add the crushed, dry almonds into the pan. When the entire mix is golden, pour the mix onto a well greased baking pan to cool.

When the nougat is completely cooled, place it between 2 pieces of wax paper and crush it with a rolling pin. The recipe will make lots of nougat, perhaps more than you need for one cake. The extra nougat can be stored in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid until next time.