Mother's Day: This Cake Comes with Memories
A friend's request prompts new attention to one of my mom's old recipes
Hello, everyone!
Happy Mother’s Day from the Mother Road—aka Route 66. If you’re reading this on Sunday, we’re just returning from a three-week road trip that took us to eight states and across more than 2,400 miles, a fascinating journey about which I plan to write more—after I’ve unpacked, both physically and mentally!
Meanwhile, my friend and fellow substacker, Amie McGraham was kind enough to include me in what she called a “MicroMoms” edition of a “virtual recipe swap” she kicked off earlier this year.
You can find a link to Amie’s piece below:
Amie has a thing for recipes handwritten on cards. In fact, she put together a great little spiral-bound book of them—Secret Recipes: Recipe Card Microstories.
My mother didn’t write recipes down on cards; she wrote them in a marble-covered notebook that’s now more than 60 years old and held together with tape. Many pages are so worn and stained, they’re hard to read. The recipe I copied onto a card for Amie is one of the earliest ones. Unlike so many others, it doesn’t credit one of my mother’s friends, and I don’t recall anyone called Gretel.
So who was this mysterious Gretel? Unfortunately I have no idea. As a child I connected her to Gretel in the Brothers Grimm fairytale that used to fill me with terror. As I wrote Amie:
“I would imagine how awful it would be to be abandoned in the woods and fattened up by a witch who wanted to eat me or my brother. But, because of the cake, I always had a nice feeling about the name Gretel. In the story, the children drop breadcrumbs in the woods so they can be found. If they’d had a cake, perhaps they would have dropped cake crumbs instead!”
I decided I’d better make the cake. The directions were a bit sketchy, in the style of so many old recipes. Would it come out? It did. I changed a few things but mostly stayed true to the original. Here’s what I wrote Amie after I made it:
“It reminded me of a combination of two cakes my mother often made—a pound cake and a sour cream coffee cake. The texture is closest to a classic pound cake, but the look is more that of a coffee cake—minus the streusel topping (though I couldn’t resist sprinkling some additional nuts, sugar and cinnamon on top!). It was the raisins in the moist cake that really made me think of my mother—she added raisins to a lot of things: apple pie, that pound cake, oatmeal, baked apples.”
In case you can’t read the recipe, below is my transcription of it, with a few changes. These days, I weigh almost everything in grams instead of by volume—it’s more accurate. But here I tried to follow my mother’s directions, sifting flour into a measuring cup, then leveling it off. I think the added nuts, sugar and cinnamon on top make a difference. Other dried fruits—chopped apricots or prunes, for example—or candied ginger (one of my mom’s favorites!) would also be nice.
Gretel’s Coffee Cake
(From the notebook of Flora Stroud)
Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened to room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
5 eggs
3 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt (I used sea salt)
Juice and rind of 1/2 lemon (You can use a whole lemon if you prefer!)
1 1/4 cups light cream (half & half)
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup chopped nuts (I used walnuts, adding more on top!)
Directions:
Grease and flour a tube pan and preheat the oven to 350°F.
Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl until light.
Add the vanilla, then the eggs one at a time, stirring after each addition.
Stir in the lemon juice and rind.
Sift the flour into measuring cups—or, if you prefer, just stir flour well and carefully spoon into cups, then level off with a knife. (You can also try weighing in grams—3 1/2 cups of King Arthur’s all-purpose white flour weighs 420 grams.)
Add the baking powder and salt to the dry ingredients, stirring slightly.
Add the flour in thirds, alternating with the cream, mixing after each addition until just incorporated. Be careful not to overmix.
Gently fold in the raisins and nuts.
Pour the batter into the pan. If you like, top with more chopped nuts, sugar and some cinnamon.
Bake the cake for 50 minutes to an hour. A toothpick should come out clean. Cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar if you haven’t added the additional nuts, sugar and cinnamon topping.
Thanks for being here! I appreciate all the likes, comments, shares and subscriptions (always free!). I’ll be back soon with more stories from our travels on the great Mother Road! And, if you want to read more about my mother, here’s a piece I wrote about her two years ago.
See you next time!
Ruth
Happy Mother's Day! How nice to read about your mother and her notebook. The cake sounds good. Do you think the sugar could be reduced, and by how much?
My mother made delicious coffee cake too but the flavors were the more usual cinnamon, sugar and walnuts. We loved it!
My mother didn't have many recipes on notes. She used The Settlement Cookbook for baking and didn't follow recipes much for cooking.
Coffee cake, a perfect Sunday morning staple! Nice Mother's Day post, Ruth.