Valentine Cake

When I was growing up, the center of the house and the center of family life was the kitchen.  My mother's spotless kitchen held many secrets.  Under the oven, in the back of the cupboard, behind the electric griddle that hardly ever got used, there used to be a clean tin from a canned ham.

The canned ham tin was used twice a year from about 1965 through 1975.  One use was as a cake pan for the Easter Egg Cake.  Wow.  Well, it's just that shape.  But it also served to make two halves of the Valentine's Day Cake.

The Valentine Cake required two bakings of a size that would have fit into a normal round 9" cake pan.   Thinking of the project with the big ends of the resulting cakes in the up position, and a section having been cut by means of a straight line off of the lower right of the left-hand one and the lower left of the right hand one, the two cakes could be joined into one at that straight line to create a passable Valentine shape.

Chocolate with pink vanilla frosting.  (That's the answer to the question I know you were about to ask.)

What's that you say?  What happens to the parts that were cut off?

Those are for the cook, of course (and once or twice, shared with her helper)!