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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

11.11.2002

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DigsMagazine.com.

heirloom recipes: let 
them eat cake 
by
Erika Molnar
1 2 3

Every once in a while, it’s worth making a cake with real ingredients. I’m not talking about a heart-friendly low-fat cheesecake made with yogurt you’ve strained overnight through cheesecloth. Those taste like cardboard, and they sure don’t beg your guests to take their leftovers home.

I’m talking about the real deal: eggs, butter, flour so fine that it gets all over your kitchen, and a heap of sugar. Tastes G-O-O-D. The kind of thing grandmas make in the golden dusty light of memory. The kind of thing you read about in that 1920’s cookbook you found at the thrift store. The kind of recipe that directs you to use a walnut-sized lump of butter and to bake it at moderate, or slow, or high heat.

I have a couple of those recipes in my tattered food-spattered cooking notebook. They’re treasures – not too tough to make, guaranteed to earn rave reviews, and almost always taken away from your kitchen by your guests when they leave.

Here you go. Enjoy them, and their stories too.

o o o

My great grandmother would probably roll over in her grave if she knew I was sharing this recipe with you. Please don’t tell her. We found it in her collection of recipes, titled, "MY Devil’s Food cake" (triple-underlined emphasis hers) opposite another devil’s food cake titled something like "Helen Smith across the street’s Devil’s Food Cake." Helen Smith’s recipe called for ungodly ingredients like Crisco. My great grandmother’s disdain was noted in the margins.

Her recipe really is much better than Helen Smith’s.

keep moseying for the recipe

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