A lamb (or Kacey) cake

Renalde Lamb Cake Recipe

The Ugly Binder, from the internet

1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, separated
1 cup milk
3 cups sifted cake flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream shortening and sugar until fluffy; add egg yolks one at a time, beating thoroughly after each one is added. Sift dry ingredients together 3 times and add alternately with milk and vanilla to creamed mixture, beating until smooth after each addition. Fold in stiffly beaten egg whites. Grease cake mold thoroughly; fill face part of mold full of batter; cover with other half of mold and place in hot oven, face down, baking for 45 minutes. Cover with pans while baking to prevent burning. I didn't do this. I secured it with silicon baking bands. Bake at 450 degrees for first 15 minutes; finish baking at 350 degrees. I checked mine 11 minutes early and it was done.  Remove from oven; lay on back of mold for 15 minutes before loosening to take out.  I let it cool completely before trying to sit it upright.  This recipe makes sufficient batter for extra cupcakes.
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I've picked up many (many, many, many) kitchen items from yard sales over the years. Unfortunately most of them get stored away someplace where I can't see them, and I forget about them. This is especially a problem with holiday items - from yard sales or not - I forget that I had them until the holiday passed. By some miracle, when I was thinking about what to make for Easter, I remembered I had picked up this cake pan last summer.

This isn't one of the original cast iron molds, it's a Wilton. It has the advantage of not having the pointy ears that are prone to falling off. It's head is a bit sturdier too. I did use a recipe from one of the older model molds. Wilton didn't provide a recipe. It suggested boxed cake mix (which I feel might not be sturdier enough to support the lamb's head but I can't say for sure) or any sturdy cake recipe, like a pound cake. This recipe is definitely similar to a pound cake. It blew me away, to be honest. It was moist, it had a great crumb, it had that simple yet wonderful flavor you would expect from these ingredients.

I used my Easy Buttercream Frosting recipe, with white food coloring (the bomb!) to frost the lamb. You could use coconut but no one seemed too keen on that idea. I colored some coconut for the 'grass'. I also added some Cadbury mini chocolate eggs when I got to my sister's house on Easter.

I did the decorating at 10pm so it was shakey. I used my Pampered Chef cake decorator and just made little swirls. I was not as neat and attentive as I might have been had it not been 10pm. The ears were supposed to be pink but I forgot before I cleaning up all the frosting. I was going to make up a small bit of pink frosting but decided to leave well enough alone.

When I started looking at lamb cakes, I thought they looked like my sister's dog Kacey, a bichon frise. We started joking that this was a Kacey cake. Some people who came to Easter dinner, who were not familiar with lamb cakes, assumed it was a Kacey cake (my dad thought it was a butter sculpture lol). At one point, I came through the dining room door into the kitchen, catching a glimpse of the cake on the kitchen table and for a moment I thought Kacey (the real dog) had climbed onto the table.  That's pretty funny since he's 15 and he was never much of a climber, not even when he was a puppy - the dog has been carried up and down steps, up and down from furniture, etc all of his life!