TPP: Restoring a Victorian Treasure

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So much has happened in the last week, I feel as though a month of activity has gone by! My precious first-born came home on Thursday the 17th; we attended his college commencement ceremony on Friday the 18th...at the end of which I took my dh to the emergency room owing to a kidney stone which attacked him during the ceremony; we held a double graduation party on Saturday the 19th (my precious second-born, Nathan, graduates from high school officially in a week, but we combined for the party); Sunday the 20th we spent all day at an outdoor church service/picnic lunch and fellowship time; yesterday the boys and I spent an hour at my mil's home, which we are prepping for an upcoming estate sale and then to put it on the market; today I have to get to the grocery store and buy some food for us to eat...I think we're really running low! My brain has not yet recovered from the expense of "emotional energy" that's been going on for the past couple of weeks, but my body is not so tired.

Anyway, in going through my mil's things (she's going to be 90 in August), I found a few treasures from the Victorian era...1890, to be exact, which is precisely the era that we've been "representing" in our years of volunteer work at Kline Creek Farm...how cool is that?!!

We are donating 3 items to Kline Creek Farm (a living history museum) -- a peacock feather fan and two shawls -- but there was one thing that caught my eye for Bryan's future home/kitchen.

I saw this sweet sheep-thingy, covered in rust and cobwebs and dried leaves, in the garage, alongside a pile of old junky stuff destined for the trash or the cheap-garage-sale-load. At the time, I had no idea what it was, other than a rusty old cast iron sheep. It's in two pieces, so it couldn't be a boot-scraper, and it didn't make sense as a doorstop...why two pieces?

But it was a sheep, and Bryan is well-on-his-way to operating a sheep farm and selling really healthy lamb, so I snapped it up! It sat, dirt and rust and cobwebs and all, for a few weeks in our garage. Finally, I hit the internet, and did a search for "two piece cast iron sheep."

JACKPOT!

Not so much "jackpot" in value (though it's been appraised at $200-$300), but in cool-ness! This is a Griswold Cast Iron Lamb Cake Mold, c. 1890-1910, but likely the earlier as it doesn't have the vent holes found in the later models. This one must have belonged to Bryan's Great-Grandmother!!! Once I realized this, my little black-iron-lamb became all the more precious to me, and I learned how to "re-season" a rusty old cast iron lamb cake mold. It was a 4 day process for me, with everything else I had going on the week before Bryan came home!

Step one was to wash and dry...this photo (and the one above) shows the cake mold after I did this:

Step two was to liberally grease the entire pan with vegetable shortening, being sure to get every nook and cranny well-covered. It took about 1/4 cup of Crisco and 10 minutes to completely coat both pans, inside and out:

Step three was to bake the greased pans in a 275 degree oven for 15 minutes, then pull them out of the oven. At this point, all the shortening had melted, some being absorbed into the pan, and the excess sitting in puddles:

Carefully, carefully, I poured the excess grease into an empty can, then put the mold back on the cookie sheets and back into the 275 degree oven for about 4 hours (the instructions said at least two hours were required). I then removed them from the oven and let them cool overnight while I did other things.

I repeated this process three more times.

At the end of it, I had two ruined cookie sheets from baked on Crisco (that's okay, they were cheap), and two beautifully seasoned, usable Victorian-era lamb cake molds!

I sent in photos and information to "ValueMyStuff.com" and they verified the date and estimated value of the lamb cake mold. I also found the original recipe from the Griswold company, as well as what modern lamb-cake-bakers are using to back delightful cakes in their Victorian-era Griswold lamb-cake molds, and I printed all of that information and stapled it into a little packet. The seasoned pans are now packed in a cardboard box to keep them clean, and the info is in there with them...all ready for Bryan's farm kitchen someday, Lord willing!

Here is a fun post that someone wrote about their experiment with an old lamb cake pan.

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