Loaded With Shinny

Yesterday I made my first Lane cake.  The cake is named for Emma Rylander Lane, who published the recipe for it in her cookbook, Some Good Things To Eat, in 1898, and is an Alabama specialty.  I'm not sure how well-known the cake is outside the South; some people know it from To Kill A Mockingbird, in which a character bakes "a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight."  (Monroeville, the town in which Nelle Harper Lee grew up and still resides, and which was supposedly the inspiration for the fictional town of Maycomb in the book, is not far from where I live.)  But I never saw a Lane cake when I lived in New York or California, so I'm not sure if everybody knows about them.

In any case, although I've eaten Lane cake many times, I've never actually baked one.  My Aunt Glo usually does, so I've never felt the need.  But my friend Laurie has a cookbook coming out, and she asked me to bake a "glamorous" cake, like a Lady Baltimore or a Lane, and take a picture to be used in the book.  So I did, and it is seriously good.  I used Scott Peacock's recipe, because he's a great cook, and because his recipe doesn't call for covering the cake in a boiled white icing but rather with more of the filling, which I love.  It didn't take as long as I thought it would; it did make an enormous mess of my kitchen.  But I think it was worth it, don't you?

And, because although Scott says in his recipe that the cake gets better with age, I'm the one who baked it and just had to see the inside:

If you decide to make this cake, I recommend Scott's recipe, which is on the Food & Wine site (http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/lane-cake).  Be careful not to overbake the layers, and make more of the filling than the recipe suggests if you want the sides thickly covered.  But don't worry if, when you first make the filling and taste it, you think you've put in way too much bourbon.  You haven't.  It will mellow as it sits, and if you can make yourself wait till the next day to taste it, it will be perfect.