When Chicagoan Susan Sanvidge and her three sisters decided to assemble a cookbook for their mom that contained all of the recipes they remembered growing up in 1960s Oshkosh, Wis., one of the first they recalled was a humble but delicious 13-by-9-inch cake filled with dates and chocolate chips.
“The thing that’s memorable, taste-wise, is the moistness and all these gorgeous little things in it to bite into,” Sanvidge said.
The recipe came from a neighbor and is now part of their cookbook, “Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe,” which went from homemade collection to official cookbook when it was published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press last fall.
“It definitely is an old-fashioned flavor,” she added. “There is cinnamon in the cake, and in the topping, and it combines with the dates and the chocolate in an interesting way.” What the cake has is texture, toothsome and substantial, and flavor that trumps beauty. It’s a trip to baking’s past, when cooks were looking for dessert, not the assembly-line perfection, or light-as-a-feather texture, that comes from a boxed mix.
These are the cakes of your mother’s and grandmother’s generation — and what better time to celebrate them than Mother’s Day?
“Mixes took off in the ’50s and they changed the way that we looked at what a cake should be,” said Nancie McDermott, author of “Southern Cakes: Sweet and Irresistible Recipes for Everyday Celebrations.” Cake mixes, she added, have that “tall, rising-up, ‘cottony’ quality. And the foolproof-ness of them got people hooked.
“When you make a cake from scratch, you’re not going to have that fluffiness — but it doesn’t really belong in there,” she said. “Our cakes [used to be] solid.”
McDermott’s book, published by Chronicle last summer, is now in its fourth printing. The recipes blend old-fashioned texture with the author’s can-do approach to scratch cakes. In a class last fall at Chicago’s World Kitchen, McDermott emphasized that scratch baking is within anybody’s reach. The results are sometimes beautiful, sometimes rustic and always highly flavored cakes.
This is not to say that desserts spawned from a box are bad — they can be quite good. What is bad is that we think their texture is the standard by which all cakes are judged.
“That’s the expectation now,” said Sarah Phillips, founder and CEO of baking911.com. “I get people on my Web site [who bake a scratch cake and] say it doesn’t taste like a cake should … it’s not light and fluffy. And I have to educate people that not all cakes have to be light and fluffy.”
True, light-as-a-feather scratch cakes have a long and revered history; chiffon and angel food are marvelous examples. (Though a scratch angel food cake will still be moister, heavier and devilishly better than the boxed version.)
But they’re just one part of the cake story. In fact, their opposite, the Bundt cake — that dense, moist, beautiful-out-of-the-pan dessert — was the result of cake lovers experiencing chiffon-cake overload, Susanna Short writes in “Bundt Cake Bliss: Delicious Desserts from Midwest Kitchens” (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $16.95).
Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield, two Jewish women living in Minneapolis in the late 1940s, “longed for the rich and heavy cakes of their heritage,” Short writes; namely, they wanted the dense kugelhopf they remembered from their native Europe. The pair stated their case to H. David Dalquist, owner of Minnesota-based Nordic Ware, asking him to make a heavy pan that could help them re-create the cake.
In 1950, Dalquist unleashed his solution to the world: the Bundt pan (the name comes from the German bund kuchen, Short writes). Bundt pans are now in 60 million households around the world, Short’s book reports, a testament to their success.
“So much that passes for cake now is either dry, or it’s airy and nothing,” Short said. “The texture, when I think of a Bundt cake, is dense, packed with flavor and very moist. You know you are not eating a boxed cake.”
Cake mixes, in addition to being supereasy, also create a “perfect” texture no matter how imperfect the skills of the baker.
“Box mixes you know are going to work,” Phillips acknowledged. “Companies formulate them to work because they want repeat business. They give you this light and fluffy texture that people just happen to love.”
What gives the cakes that ubiquitous lightness is listed on the sides of those boxes.
“In a mix cake there [can be] all sorts of chemicals in there in order to make sure that it is foolproof, even if you use the wrong size pan or your oven is off,” McDermott said. “Convenience often costs us flavor.”
Chemical emulsifiers are added to many cake mixes to keep the fat and liquid from separating; leavening agents help the cake rise, Ann Byrn explains in “The Cake Mix Doctor.” The signature “cake mix” taste often comes from vanillin, a chemically created flavoring. Phillips also credits bleached cake flour for both the light texture and the aftertaste (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
The scratch cake’s leading players, butter and eggs, together with the measuring vagaries that change ever so slightly from cook to cook, and day to day, create a cake that isn’t wearing a uniform, and can be counted on for good taste — especially if you use (and you should) pure vanilla extract.
“The flavor is so much better with a scratch cake,” Phillips said. Yet she is constantly fielding requests from home bakers who want to know how to make their scratch cakes turn out like boxed mixes. She tries to help, but ultimately, it’s an exercise in futility: If you want a boxed-cake texture, well, open a box.
“I don’t think cake mixes are ‘cheating,'” McDermott said. “But when you put them side by side, to me there’s no question which is better, and more wonderful.”
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Cakes: Myths and tips
Here are two myths to break you out of your fear of scratch cakes:
*Myth: A perfect cake emerges from the oven with a flat top. “They’re never even!” author Nancie McDermott exclaimed. Cakes usually emerge “domed,” especially the 8- and 9-inch rounds. “Bakeries have people leveling [the] cakes,” she added.
If you want to level a cake, it’s best done — gently — to a cooled cake and using a long serrated knife. But frankly, don’t feel you have to level the layers: Just add more frosting to even it out.
*Myth: A stand mixer is essential to success. McDermott does not even own a stand mixer. While acknowledging that the appliance is wonderful when you’re whipping cream or a dozen egg whites, she thinks that hand mixers, which give you more contact with the bowl and its contents, do a better job with most cake batters. You can buy a good hand mixer starting at $20.
Two things that are very helpful for the home baker:
1. An oven thermometer. Most ovens are off, temperature-wise. This little gadget, which fits on the rack of your oven, starts at about $6 and guarantees that the oven hits the temperature you need. Even supermarkets sell them. However, if you don’t have one, don’t sweat it. You’ll just have to rely on the toothpick-coming-out-clean test.
2. Use pure vanilla extract. Authors McDermott and Susanna Short, who are not slaves to perfection, emphasize using the real stuff.
Pure vanilla doesn’t have to be more expensive: Aldi sells a fine vanilla for about $2 per bottle.
— R.E.
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Step away from the box
Lest we put the cart before the horse, we need to separate the baker from the boxed mix.
“I don’t think, in the history of time, that people have watched other people bake more, read more about baking and recipes, and cooked less themselves,” said caterer Susanna Short, author of “Bundt Cake Bliss.” “It’s kind of crazy.”
It’s not always time constraints that explain the popularity of cake mixes. Some people are simply afraid to bake from scratch. “You need a little more technical expertise to make a scratch cake,” said Sarah Phillips of baking911.com. “I have some really good recipes [on the site] that are foolproof, and people are [still] afraid.”
With the growing number of fine cake mixes on the market, you can serve a very nice cake. But it’s not a scratch cake, and honest, it’s not that hard to do. If you can follow directions, contends Nancie McDermott, author of “Southern Cakes,” you can bake dessert.
“An ordinary person could make a wonderful, simple cake without a whole lot of stress and effort,” she said.
Most cake recipes require ingredients any supermarket sells, and kitchen tools you probably have: a mixing spoon, some bowls and a cake pan, measuring spoons and cups, maybe a whisk, maybe a hand mixer.
If you really want to get fancy without fuss, Short’s pro-Bundt arguments are compelling too. The Bundt pan, sold at kitchenware and department stores for about $20, creates a sculpted dessert that needs just a dusting of confectioners’ sugar to dress it up. It’s fancier than a 13-by-9-inch cake and faster to finish than a layer cake.
The point is, baking from scratch is worth the effort and reaches back to something that was common to your mother (OK, maybe your grandmother). If you don’t have an older relative or friend to show you the ropes, books such as McDermott’s and online sites such as baking911.com can educate and inspire.
Short recalled a recent phone call from a friend, a successful, hard-nosed attorney who had just made her first Bundt cake from scratch.
“She sounded like a 9-year-old on the phone,” Short said. “The fact that she read the recipe, and she made it, and it turned out, was very thrilling for her.”
— Renee Enna
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Have your cake, and eat it too
How often have you heard this one? “Oh, no cake for me. I’m watching my diet.”
We empathize. Cake is not health food, and the gargantuan wedges that can wind up on a dessert plate can be sort of scary. However, we also feel that cake is essential to any celebration.
So when Nancie McDermott, author of “Southern Cakes,” visited Chicago last year to teach a cake class at World Kitchen, one of the tips she shared was how to cut a layer cake into thin, diet-friendly slices. (Another bonus to dense cakes: They’re easier to slice.)
Note: Serrated knives and a gentle sawing motion make cutting easier.
1. Cut the cake into quarters.
2. Instead of cutting wedges, slice parallel to one of the four cuts you’ve just created. Keep slicing; each quarter should yield 5 or 6 slices. The last slices of each quarter will be a small one consisting mostly of frosting — and they’ll have their own fan club.
If some guests want a traditional wedge, just use this technique on a quarter or half of the cake.
— R.E.
Date chocolate-chip cake
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Yield: 12 servings
This dense and moist old-fashioned cake came from a family neighbor in the early 1960s, writes Susan Sanvidge in “Apple Betty & Sloppy Joe.” It’s filled with plumped dates and partially melted chocolate chips that add flavor and texture. The book also notes that, yes, the vanilla is stirred in at the very end.
Cake:
1 cup chopped dates, see note
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups boiling water
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup shortening
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons sifted flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon each: baking soda, salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Topping:
2/3 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped nuts
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Whipped cream, optional
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place the dates in a small bowl; sprinkle with the baking soda. Pour the boiling water over dates; let cool.
2. Cream the sugar and shortening in a large bowl; beat in the eggs, one at a time. Sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Alternately add the flour mixture and cooled date mixture to the sugar-shortening mixture. Stir in the vanilla. Pour the batter into a greased and floured 13-by-9-inch pan.
3. For the topping, combine the chocolate chips, nuts, sugar and cinnamon in a bowl; sprinkle mixture over the top of the batter. Bake until cake springs back when lightly pressed, about 30 minutes. Serve with whipped cream, if desired.
Note: To chop the sticky dates, use kitchen shears lightly coated with non-stick spray
Nutrition information per serving: 383 calories, 43% of calories from fat, 19 g fat, 7 g saturated fat, 35 mg cholesterol, 52 g carbohydrates, 5 g protein, 242 mg sodium, 3 g fiber
Aunt Nettie’s orange-nut cake
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Yield: 12 servings
This dense cake, adapted from “Bundt Cake Bliss,” by Susanna Short, has truly old-fashioned credentials: The recipe is from Short’s great-great aunt, born in 1867, and was passed down to her grandmother, who gave it to her. As odd as the direction is, yes, you process the entire orange, peel and all — Short’s grandmother used a hand-cranked grinder to do the job. The orange peel creates an intense flavor; feel free to add less if you like. One more thing: If you only have a 9-cup Bundt pan, fill it about two-thirds full with batter, and use the rest for cupcakes; you should have enough for four, Short said.
1 unpeeled orange, washed, coarsely chopped
1 cup raisins or dried cranberries
1/4 cup hot water
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened
2 eggs
3/4 cup each: buttermilk, finely chopped nuts
Confectioners’ sugar
1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the orange and raisins in a food processor; pulse until the mixture is finely ground. Pour 1/4 cup hot water over the mixture; set aside.
2. Combine the flour, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl; set aside. Combine the sugar and butter in a large bowl; beat with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Alternately add the flour mixture and buttermilk to the sugar-butter mixture, beating until smooth with each addition. Stir in the reserved orange-raisin mixture and the nuts. Pour batter into a greased and floured 12-cup Bundt pan.
3. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 40-50 minutes. Let cake cool in pan 10 minutes. Invert it onto a wire rack; cool completely. Dust with confectioners’ sugar.
Nutrition information per serving: 328 calories, 35% of calories from fat, 13 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 56 mg cholesterol, 50 g carbohydrates, 6 g protein, 232 mg sodium, 2 g fiber
Yellow cake with chocolate frosting
Preparation time: 55 minutes
Cooking time: 35 minutes
Yield: 12 servings
This cake uses two recipes adapted from Nancie McDermott’s cookbook, “Southern Cakes.” The yellow cake is the foundation for her coconut cake; the easy frosting is from her banana cake.
Cake:
3 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened
2 cups granulated sugar
4 eggs
Frosting:
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
1/3 cup each: cocoa powder, evaporated milk or
half-and-half
4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl; set aside. Combine the milk and vanilla in a small bowl; set aside.
2. Beat the butter in a large bowl with a mixer on medium speed until creamy. Add the sugar; beat until light and evenly combined. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until the mixture is smooth, about 3 minutes. Add one-third of the flour mixture; beat on low speed until well combined. Beat in half of the milk mixture. Beat in one-third of the flour mixture and the remaining milk. Beat in the remaining flour mixture just until combined.
3. Scrape the batter into two greased and floured 9-inch round cake pans; bake until golden brown and cakes spring back when touched lightly in the center, 25-30 minutes. Cool pans on wire racks 10 minutes; turn out the cakes onto the racks. Turn the layers top side up. Cool completely.
4. For the frosting, combine the butter, cocoa and evaporated milk in a medium saucepan over medium heat; heat to a gentle boil. Cook, stirring, until mixture is dark and shiny, about 3 minutes. Remove pan from heat; stir in the confectioners’ sugar and vanilla; beat with an electric mixer on low speed until smooth and thick.
5. Place one cake layer, top side down, on a cake plate; spread about 1 cup of the frosting over the top. Cover with second cake layer, top side up; spread the remaining frosting evenly over the sides and top.
Nutrition information per serving: 641 calories, 35% of calories from fat, 26 g fat, 16 g saturated fat, 134 mg cholesterol, 99 g carbohydrates, 7 g protein, 200 mg sodium, 2 g fiber
… and for one from a mix
Still want to use a cake mix? This recipe is adapted from one from Sarah Phillips, founder and CEO of baking911.com. Use your frosting of choice.
Better yellow cake from a box
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes
Yield: 10 servings
1 box (18.25 ounces) yellow cake mix
1 1/4 cups cake flour
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 cup each: evaporated milk, sour cream
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the cake mix, flour and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer on low speed, about 10 seconds.
2. Add the eggs, milk, sour cream, oil and vanilla; beat on low speed just to combine, about 30 seconds. Increase speed to medium-high; beat until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes
3. Fold the batter once or twice with a large rubber spatula, making sure you scrape the side and bottom of the bowl. Divide the cake batter evenly into two greased 9-inch round cake pans. Bake until lightly browned and toothpick inserted in the middle has just a few moist crumbs, 40-45 minutes. Cool pans on wire racks 15 minutes; unmold to cool completely.
Nutrition information per serving: 605 calories, 42% of calories from fat, 28 g fat, 7 g saturated fat, 103 mg cholesterol, 80 g carbohydrates, 9 g protein, 377 mg sodium, 1 g fiber
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renna@tribune.com
