March 19th Friday Have heat the brick oven baked
mince & dried apple pies & Jenny Lind cake Amelia
went to Mr Torreys this morning and Orinthia
afternoon & self this evening, when we returned
found Edwin & wife here. Mr Whitwell called
had called at Edwins for the first time
Jenny Lind, international opera star, was so famous at mid-century that many things were named in her honor: A street in North Easton, for one, and more. The “Swedish Nightingale,” young, pretty and gifted, was promoted to the hilt by master showman P. T. Barnum. Happy fans and clever merchandisers attached her name to a bed, a bonnet, a steamer trunk, a pudding, a saloon in Brooklyn and a gold-rush town on the Calaveras River in California. She also had a cake named after her.
Evelina baked a Jenny Lind cake today. Perhaps she took the “receipt” from a popular cookbook by Mrs. A. L. Webster titled The Improved Housewife. The result was a real departure from the usual fruitcake:
“Stir together 2 cups white sugar and 1 butter. Add 10 egg-whites, well beaten. Just before setting in , add half a teaspoonful soda dissolved in cup of cold milk and 1 and half cream tartar mixed with 4 cups flour. Flavor with vanilla, or to taste. Line pans with buttered paper, and bake in moderate oven fifteen or twenty minutes. Frost it. – Or: the 10 yolks with the other ingredients as above, and the grated rind of 2 lemons for the flavoring, make a nice cake.”
evelinaames 
Nice cake!