The Boston Globe du lieu suivant : Boston, Massachusetts • 322

I I I COOKING By Sheryl Julian and Julie Riven Photograph by Jim Scherer A SIMPLE YELLOW cake is made with a little butter, plenty of eggs, and hot milk. milk. This one, of course, isn't rich because of some baking chemistry. It has all the butter a cake can hold. And it's splendid.

But we kept returning to the simple yellow cake with its three tablespoons of butter, airy slices, and humble beginnings. HOT-MILK CAKE MAKES 1 DEEP 10-INCH CAKE The original recipe for this cake came from Peter Kelly's great-grandmother, who gave it to her daughter-in-law, Kelly's grandmother. She gave it to her daughter, Kelly's mother, Kathryn, who made it for every occasion while he was growing up in Valatie, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. She often multiplied the recipe by 6 or 7 (but never recorded the measurements for the larger cakes). We tripled Kathryn Kelly's basic measurements without tripling the baking powder to make this version.

We used a 1 -piece tube pan, since the thin batter will leak out of a typical angel-food pan with removable bottom. Butter (for the pan) Flour (for the pan) 3 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Vi teaspoon salt 6 eggs 2Vi cups sugar IVi cups whole milk 3 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons vanilla extract Set the oven at 325 degrees. Butter a 1 -piece 10-inch tube pan. Line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper cut to fit. Butter the paper and dust the pan with flour, tapping out the excess.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. In an electric mixer, beat the eggs and sugar at medium speed or 5 minutes or until thickened and the mixture ribbons onto itself when the beaters are lifted. In a small saucepan, heat the milk and butter to scalding. With the mixer set on low, beat in the vanilla and then the flour mixture. It's OK if there are still pockets of flour.

Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Beat the hot milk mixture into the batter just until it is well combined. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the cake for 60 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 20 minutes, and then turn it out, remove the parchment paper, and set it right side up on a wire rack to cool completely.

Cut the cake into thick slices for serving. Milk Run For old-fashioned cakes that are improbably rich and feathery light, hold the butter and reach for a pan of scalded milk. When you beat scalded milk into a cake batter, a robust mixture turns thin, runny, and looks ruined. But something magical is happening, and the results the classic hot-milk cake, hich dates at least to the Great Depression are light, buttery, and golden. This genre of cakes typically contains little butter but plenty of milk and eggs.

The hot milk, explains Johnson Wales University instructor Peter J. Kelly, whose mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all made the same cake, begins to poach the eggs. So the finished cake tastes rich and, lacking a large quantity of butter, almost feathery. We think of these confections as make-do, as if those industrious home bakers of yesteryear had decided that the milk as creamy enough, so why not use it in place of butter? Perhaps there was more milk on hand than butter. Many old-fashioned cakes have similar odd instructions, calling for a cup of boiling water, for instance, to be added to the batter when you're almost finished mixing it.

We noticed this method in a gingerbread cake that cookbook author Marie Simmons wrote about. You're sure it must be wrong, and yet the cake bakes beautifully, and the results are immensely pleasing. We liked the hot liquid method so much that we decided to do a chocolate version with plenty of butter, cocoa powder, melted bittersweet chocolate, and.