Brown Sugar Cake

Let's start this off with an easy one.

Ah cake, a form of sweet bread with traditional recipes from almost every corner of the world.  In the US we eat it as a dessert, typically, with or without ice cream or fruit on top or bottom.  Whatever way you have it, it's almost always a comforting treat.

Helen's breadbox had the following "recipe" written on a torn off piece of paper:

Not much of a recipe, but it does have a complete list of ingredients.  Now to figure out what this is; could be cookies or a cake or who knows.  I did notice a large amount of liquid to flour so that led me to believe this was a batter.  Probably for a cake, but what kind of cake is it?  It's not chocolate or "yellow" or anything I'm used to seeing.  So anyway, using the creaming method I proceeded to produce a batter which ended up looking like this:

It filled two 8" round cake pans about half full and when baked at 325 degrees F for 30 min I got this:

Frosted with a simple vanilla frosting:

Lovely, isn't it?  But what kind of cake is it?  The best I could figure out is it's just cake.  No special name for it is needed.  I later had a conversation with my good friend Jon and he said his mother would make a similar cake for birthdays and it had no special name.  It's just cake.  So I give you the recipe for "just cake" or brown sugar cake if you need a fancy name for it:

Helen Reilly's Brown Sugar Cake:

Ingredients

2 c.  Brown Sugar

1/2 c. Shortening

2 Eggs

1 tsp Vanilla

1 1/4 c. Milk

2 c. Flour

1 tsp. Baking Soda

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

2) Mix flour and baking soda together and set aside.

3) Cream together shortening and brown sugar.

4) Add eggs one at a time and vanilla and cream until well blended.

5) Add ½ of the flour mixture and stir well.

6) Add ½ of the milk and stir well.

7) Repeat with remaining flour mixture and milk.

8) Pour into two greased 8” round cake pans.

9) Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

10) Allow to cool completely before frosting.

Makes two 8” round layers, approximately 24 servings

It all started with a breadbox?

My lovely wife, Pam, had a great grandmother (of course) and her name was Helen Reilly.  Helen, had a breadbox and as far as we know she didn't keep much bread it.  Instead she used it for holding recipes.  This box contained newspaper clippings, hand written lists of ingredients, full printed recipes, etc. some written on what looks like scoring paper for card games.

It's these scrap paper recipes (or lack there of) that intrigue me.  I envision Helen and friends sitting around a card table playing Rummy or some other card game while eating some sort of dessert and Helen saying something like, "Wow, this is delicious you must give me the recipe" and someone siting across the table starts spilling out a list of ingredients.  Helen frantically grabs whatever paper she can find, the scoring paper in this case, and starts writing as much as she can remember hoping to figure out exactly what to do later.  This paper eventually ends up in her breadbox of "recipes to save for later."  Whether she made the recipe again or not is perhaps not the point, but she saved it and somehow the breadbox and everything in it ended up in Pam's mother's basement to be found by Pam and I.

Since that time I have taken it upon myself to figure out these recipes, what they make, how many they serve, and the specifics of how to prepare them.  This blog is my attempt to publish my findings to the world as well as comment on my other findings in recipes in general.

If you have a recipe or scrap of paper that looks like the start of a recipe, feel free send it my way.  I'm always interested researching new recipes.