Cake: Lady Baltimore Cake

Lady Baltimore Cake is an achingly sweet white layer cake held together with a sugary boiled and beaten filling spiked with nuts and dried or candied fruits. It is frosted with boiled meringue flavored with almond and vanilla extracts and lemon. Although some have suggested that the cake can be traced back to Dolley Madison, the towering, layered sponge cake suggests late nineteenth-century origins. Legend places it as a specialty of a Charleston, South Carolina, restaurant later renamed “The Lady Baltimore Tea Room” in honor the cake.