Recipes from Cooking with Doyle Moore on Focus 580
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Cooking on Focus 580: Recipes for November 2008
November 4, 2008: Eccentric Cakes (including Election Cake)
It’s cold again and people are using their ovens and thinking about baking. Doyle wants to talk about cakes, and not just run-of-the-mill cakes, but unusual ones, perhaps with some odd ingredients.
HARTFORD ELECTION CAKE
Appropriately for today, he has found a recipe that goes back to early American times and was apparently something that people made on Election Day. Doyle has long known about Election Cake so he started hunting in his cookbooks for recipes, but didn’t find very much. He did find a recipe in the White House Cookbook of 1887, by Mrs. F.L. Gillette (a reproduction edition has been edited by Hugo Ziemann), but it’s so minimal. Doyle remembers, though, that Election Cake was very special to Connecticut. Since the Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas or other holidays, they made Election Day into a holiday in which everything broke loose, people gathered in town and visited each others’ houses. They took the idea of a “great cake” from England (and it was a “great” cake: the recipe started with 5 pounds flour, 2 pounds butter, and 2 pounds of sugar). The women of the town would bake these huge great cakes made 2-4 days in advance (they took a while because they contained yeast).
It was kind of like a fruit cake: Doyle uses raisins and currants and some nuts and puts a lemon-sugar icing on it and cooks it in a bundt cake pan. After baking, store it in the refrigerator for a day or two. It’s a very dense yeast bread cake reminiscent of a fruit cake.
Eventually Doyle found lots of information and many recipes for Election Cake on the internet. This one is adapted from from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984):
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⅔ cup warm water
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2 packages dry yeast
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3⅔ cups and one Tbsp. unbleached flour (or white whole wheat)
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1 cup unsalted butter, softened
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2 eggs, beaten
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2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
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1 cup buttermilk or sour milk*
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1 tsp. baking soda
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2 tsp. cinnamon
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½ tsp. ground cloves
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½ tsp. mace
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½ tsp. nutmeg
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1⅓ cups raisins (or mixture of raisins and currants)
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1 cup chopped pecans (or whole)
*If you don’t have buttermilk, you can make sour milk by putting a tablespoon of vinegar in a cup (to fill) of regular milk and leave it ten minutes.
Pour the water into a large mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast over. Stir and let stand for 5 minutes to dissolve.
Add 1 cup of the flour and beat until well blended; the mixture will be quite stiff. Add the butter and beat until smooth. Then add the eggs, brown sugar, buttermilk, remaining 2⅔ cups flour, baking soda, and spices, and beat for 3 minutes.
Toss the raisins and pecans with the remaining 1 Tbsp. flour to coat them; then add to the batter and stir to mix well.
Divide the batter evenly and place into two greased 8½ by 4½ by 2½ inch loaf pans or one tube (bundt) pan. Cover loosely with towel and let rest for 1½ hours.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake the cakes for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until the center tests clean; it will be very firm and won’t “bounce back.” Remove from oven and let cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Then turn out on rack and cool completely.
Various coverings were used. One was a molasses and egg white glaze, though Doyle couldn’t quite find what the exact mixture was (cooked?). So he used a lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze (orange would also work).
You don’t have to wait four years to make it!
A caller from Champaign has another Hartford Election Cake recipe that is also an “odd ingredient” recipe. She found it in her mom’s American Heritage Cookbook (© 1964) and made it to take to class when she was a child. It says the earliest printed version of the recipe was in 1800 in Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery.
This recipe calls for 1 medium-sized potato, boiled and riced; Doyle explains that this is the homemade method of making a sourdough from scratch. Make a sponge with potato, milk, salt, sugar, shortening, and yeast. When you add the other ingredients after a rising, include some sherry.
Top it with a “milk” frosting, a cooked frosting:
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1½ cups sugar
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½ cup milk
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1 tsp. butter
Cook stirring occasionally until mixture begins to boil; boil until soft boil stage, like a seven-minute icing.
IN PRAISE OF FRUIT CAKE
David speaks in favor of fruit cake. People who complain every year about fruit cake just haven’t ever had a good one. Its function is to be around for a good period of time, you slice off small amounts at a time. He found a good recipe from Elton Brown; it was good right out of the oven, but you can also temper it with brandy. It doesn’t have the day-glo candied fruit, it just uses good dried fruit: raisins, currants, apricots, blueberries, prunes, cranberries, cherries, a big mix. You hydrate the fruits in rum. The cake has a lot of butter and sugar and rich ingredients; David also adds nuts and bakes it in mini loaf pans so they make good gifts.
GARBANZO CAKE
A caller from Urbana has a Mexican recipe for an unusual cake made with garbanzos.
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2 10-oz. cans of chickpeas
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4 beaten eggs
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1 cup sugar (brown or white)
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1 tsp. baking powder
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2 tsp. cinnamon
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grated zest of one orange
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juice of one orange
Purée the chickpeas and mix with all the other ingredients. Bake it in a loaf pan at 350º for 1½ hours. It’s very rich and protein-rich. This is a good cake for anyone who cannot eat wheat flour.
Sprinkle the top with cinnamon and sugar when it’s done.
GERMAN “SINKING CAKE”
A caller from Champaign has a recipe she brought back from when she lived in Germany, very easy and with no extra fat (besides the eggs) called “sinking cake” (“Versaink Küchen”). The batter is really stiff and you stand apple slices up in the batter; the batter grows over the apples so it looks like they’ve sunk in – you see a trace on the top.
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200 g. sugar (1¼ cup)
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4 eggs, beaten (and add to sugar)
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200 g. flour (1¾ cup)
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1 tsp. baking powder
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apples
Beat the eggs until frothy, then add the sugar slowly. Mix the baking powder with the flour and add that mixture slowly to the eggs/sugar, stirring it under. Pour into a 8” springform pan; if you have a 9” pan, use 250 g. sugar, 5 eggs, and 250 g. flour.
Core (and optionally peel) the apples and cut into wedges and stick them around in the batter. The batter will come up about half way on the apples, but by the time it’s finished baking it will be all the way to the top.
Bake at 350º for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
OLD FASHIONED RAISIN CAKE
The caller has another recipe which her mother made for summer birthday cakes. In July she made it with raspberries rather than raisins, and in August she used blueberries. The batter is stiff so the fruit stays suspended.
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½ cup Crisco (or margarine)
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1 cup sugar
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2 eggs
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½ tsp. vanilla or almond extract
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⅓ cup sour milk
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¼ tsp. baking soda (in milk)
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1 cup raisins (or raspberries or blueberries)
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2 cups flour
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2 tsp. baking powder
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¼ tsp. salt (if the shortening is unsalted)
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¼ tsp. ginger
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¼ tsp. cinnamon
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¼ tsp. cloves
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¼ tsp. allspice
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¼ tsp. mace
Cream the shortening. Add the sugar and cream, then add the eggs. Sift the dry ingredients together and add them and the milk alternately to the mixture. Add the fruit, dusted with flour.
Bake in an 8x8x2 pan (or a 9-inch round pan) at 350º for 1 hour.
It’s a little dense, but it’s great with glass of milk.
MASHED POTATO CHOCOLATE SPICE CAKE
A caller from Champaign has her mother’s recipe for a mashed potato cake. It’s a chocolate spice cake, extremely rich. She always topped it with an even richer fudge icing.
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1 cup butter or margarine, softened
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2 cups sugar
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½ cup milk
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2 cups flour, sifted
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4 eggs, separated
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2 tsp. baking powder
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1 tsp. nutmeg
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1 tsp. cloves
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1 tsp. cinnamon
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1 tsp. allspice
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1 tsp. vanilla
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½ cup baking chocolate, melted
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1 cup pecans, chopped
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1 cup mashed potatoes, fresh from the table with whatever salt, pepper, butter might be there; if left over, she warmed them up before she made the cake
Cream the butter and sugar, then add the egg yolks and mashed potatoes. Add the milk and dry ingredients alternately in three batches; stir in the chocolate, spices, and pecans, mixing thoroughly. Fold in the beaten egg whites. Bake in a sheet cake pan about 45 minutes at 325º. Cool and if desired frost with fudge icing and arrange whole pecans on top. It has a wonderful texture, “mouth appeal.”
Doyle has one more recipe:
SAPELO ISLAND HARD TIME CAKE
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1½ cups self-rising flour
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¼ tsp. ground cinnamon
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¼ tsp. ground cloves
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1 cup molasses
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1 Tbsp. butter, melted
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1 tsp. baking soda
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⅔ cup warm water
No eggs and only 1 Tbsp. butter.
Preheat the oven to 350º F. Lightly grease a 9-inch square or round pan.
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, and cloves and stir with a fork to mix well. Add the molasses and melted butter and use a large wooden spoon to mix everything into a thick, smooth batter. Stir the baking soda into the warm water, and then add it to the bowl, stirring until the butter is smooth and thin. Quickly pour it into the prepared pan.
Bake at 350ºF for 25 to 30 minutes, until the cake is a deep, handsome, shiny brown, springs back when touched lightly in the middle, and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool in the pan to room temperature on a wire rack or folded kitchen towel. Cut the cake and serve right from the pan. It’s a knockout cake, and can be made just from pantry items. It keeps well too, is as good on the sixth day as on the first.
If you don’t have self-rising flour, combine 1½ cups of all-purpose flour with 1½ tsp. of baking powder, ⅝ tsp. of baking soda, and ¾ tsp. of salt.
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