Oh, for a good right arm!

 

Do you ever not get around to baking something meant for Christmas until after Christmas? This Tennessee Jam Cake was meant for December but now I better claim it's for St. Valentine's Day. (Google sent me the picture above, animated but I can't make it dance for you.)

When RH's mother was alive she used to make Jam Cakes for Christmas and he loved them but I don't have her recipe. Instead I used Alabama author Eugene Walters' recipe for the cake but ditched his icing recipe as it has raw egg whites in it. 

I never can pull off pretty baking styling  pics because I always seem to make a mess while I'm cooking but I do have a gorgeous view to the pond outside the window where my pretty blue mixer sits. 

 

One reason I loved the way this cake recipe turned out is because it called for separating 5 eggs and beating the egg whites stiff before incorporating them into the final cake batter. That step makes a lighter cake. Then again, I love a dense cake too... I guess I just plain like a homemade cake, however it's made and this one was delicious!

 

That's RH icing the cake for me. He also had to beat the icing for me because I've been having a lot of trouble with my right arm since Christmas when I hurt my left wrist and started overcompensating using my right arm. These things seem to take a long time to heal.

RH claims that his mother used her coffee icing with the jam cake and I do have her recipe for that because I have her Devil's Food Cake recipe.  So yummy coffee icing went on this.

I tried to find a similar jam cake recipe to link to rather than trying to type out this one but rejected every one until I found a recipe for it from one of our favorite Nashville restaurants that is very popular with local country music stars. RH and I and our daughter and son-in-law had our Thanksgiving dinner there one year, such good Southern food, the walls covered in autographed photographs of the greats of country music and often a few live ones to see too.

So here's a link to the Loveless Cafe's Big Momma's Blackberry Jam Cake! 

And Big Momma's recipe looks so good that I'm going to try it next time, especially since I think this cake needs caramel icing instead of coffee. (Not that I couldn't sit and eat a bowl of my mother-in-law's coffee icing all day.)

I should have taken a picture of my fabulous cake pans. If you love to bake cakes please check out Chicago Metallic Professional Lifetime Non-Stick Cake Pans. I bought two of them from Chef's Catalogue years ago when Cook's Illustrated magazine recommended them. I don't know if the ones sold on Amazon are the same quality as my original ones that I paid $16 a piece for (you only were allowed to buy 2) because they are super heavy and I see some complaints on Amazon that theirs aren't as heavy as the old original ones. And Chef's Catalogue sold all their inventory to Tuesday Morning but say they'll be back soon. I hope so because I furnished my kitchen over the years from that catalogue.
 

RH took big slices of cake to family the next day and we really need to send more because it's taking up so much room in our small fridge. I think most cakes are so much better cold, don't you? 

RH has had to help with a lot of my cooking lately as my elbow and wrist just won't do chopping and slicing and opening jars right now. I won't include a recipe for the dish in this next picture because I've posted about it in the past and almost no one likes canned sardines the way we do but here's a picture of my lunch the other day, Sardine Rotini Pasta Salad. I washed all the produce in my fridge and RH chopped it and opened the cans of sardines for me and stirred, another thing that's hard for me to do right now, and by golly, this is a good salad. 

A big container of it went to our first born who likes sardines too, and my recipe for that is promised to his wife because mom just might be past the point of a lot of chopping anymore. And dad's not too thrilled with chopping vegetables right now. 

Not with me standing over him saying "No, not that way, you're getting the pieces too big! Slice them thin! And you have to cut the cilantro in small slivers! I won't be able to eat big pieces of onion, you'll have to chop it extra fine."

Oh, for a good right arm!