Cake | Birthdays | Recipes | Great Depression | World War 2

What’s a Birthday Without Cake?

A Family History of Cakes (Recipes Included)

Every family has a favorite cake that Mom or Grandma baked year after year for birthdays, the church bake sale, or the county fair in hopes of winning a blue ribbon.

Flourless Cakes

Gluten-free cakes, cakes made with garbonzo beans, ground almonds, cornmeal are all the rage now. But flourless cakes aren’t new. During the Great Depression and World War 2 nothing was wasted.

Nana’s Potato Cake

During World War 1, Nana, my grandmother, made her first cake with left-over mashed potatoes. This moist chocolate cake was the beginning of my family’s love-affair with Nana’s potato cake. She continued making it during the Great Depression when nothing went to waste.

Then in 1942, as part of The War effort, homemakers were limited by rationing including flour, sugar, and butter. Nana would use her ration card for enough sugar and flour for the cake and a new substitute for butter called “margarine” so she didn’t have to waste her ration card on butter. Then she used last night’s left-over mashed potatoes for part of the flour.

No one went without a birthday cake during the Depression and World War 2.

Give it try. This is one delicious cake! (If you’re lazy like me, just buy some already-mashed potatoes in the dairy aisle or the deli.)

Recipe for Nana’s Potato Cake (recipe cards from Nana and Mother often don’t come with “how-to.” It’s assumed you’ll know what to do.) 2 cups flour 1 cup butter (or margarine) 1 cup milk 1 cup mashed potatoes 2 1/2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking power 1/2 cup cocoa 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg 4 eggs beaten separately 1 cup nuts

I’ve made it in a tube-cake pan, baked it at 350, and started checking it in 60 minutes. (Could try 325 and bake for longer.)

Mother’s Sponge Cake

My Mother never made Nana’s potato cake. Instead, she made melt-in-your mouth sponge cake with 7-minute white frosting for birthdays. For my birthday, the cake always had pink candles. My Father got blue candles on his cake. She could do the frosting on the stove without a candy thermometer. (I can’t even make it with a candy thermometer.)

When my son was 12 or 13 and we were living in Eugene, Oregon, my Mother drove down from Portland with my birthday cake: an angel food cake she hadn’t frosted and had made from cake mix in a box. A sad birthday indeed! I’ve always disliked angel food cake — unless covered with 1/2 pint of strawberries and an equal amount of whipped cream. But then why not just skip the cake?

Stephen thought the cake was fine and gobbled up a couple of pieces. But what did he know about sponge cake with 7-minute frosting and pink candles?

Recipe for Mother’s Sponge Cake 5 eggs separated (Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold in gently.) 1 cup sugar 1 cup cake flour salt 1/4 orange juice Bake for an hour at 325.

MaryJo’s Cake I knew how to scramble eggs and make Nana’s coffee cake from Jiffy Mix when I got married. Wasn’t bad at peanut butter sandwiches and under pressure could fry a burger without burning it. My Mother was fussy and didn’t want people messing in her kitchen. She never taught me how to cook.

So being of a perfectionist and serious nature and wanting to be a good wife, I subscribed to Gourmet Magazine (now defunct). I also bought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. A Betty Crocker first cookbook might have been a better choice!

Years later I have just one recipe from those early years of learning to cook: Southern Georgia Chocolate Pound Cake from a 1966 issue of Gourmet Magazine.

I first made the cake in our tiny attic apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. (My new husband was a graduate student at Yale. I worked on campus at Sterling Library.) It’s Stephen’s favorite cake. Actually, it’s everyone’s favorite cake. I’ve made it dozens of times and have had some of my most memorable cooking disasters with it.

I would eventually bake Southern Georgia Chocolate Pound Cake in Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Oregon. Eventually we moved back to Colorado. I made the cake. I followed the directions carefully. But when I took the cake out of the oven, it was fudge. Huh?

Oh right, altitude in Denver is 5,280 feet! The altitude hadn’t been an issue in Connecticut, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Oregon. We ate the cake cut into pieces of fudge. No frosting needed. Everyone enjoyed it. And I added high-altitude directions to the recipe.

Stephen grew up. Eric’s kids grew up. The kids had kids of their own. Stephen’s family is in NH. We’re living in NJ. I’ll make a Southern Georgia Chocolate Pound Cake for Stephen’s birthday and take it up to NH for a big birthday celebration. What a treat. The grandkids have never had The Cake! And Stephen hadn’t had it for years. A glorious surprise!

My bag is packed, gas in the car, tires checked, ready to go. Nothing left but taking the cake out of the oven and letting it cool a bit before putting it in the newly-purchased, extra-large cake carrier.

But wait! Something is seriously wrong. The cake isn’t done. I set the timer for 5 more minutes. It isn’t done. Five more minutes, still not done. Then I realize the oven isn’t hot. It’s warmish.

The propane company hadn’t come yet to install a large propane tank. We had just moved in and were using a patio barbeque-size propane tank somehow hooked up to the stove from the deck by the previous tenants. This miniature propane tank was empty. Eric was relieved that the contraption hadn’t set the house on fire. I was devastated that I had no cake.

But one must be resourceful. I’ll put the cake batter in a large plastic bowl with lid and bake the cake when I get to New Hampshire. After arriving in New Hampshire, I discuss the cake dilemma with Jen, Stephen’s partner. She calls her mother. The three of us decide that baking a cake from batter that has been un-refrigerated for five hours isn’t a good idea.

I bought a chocolate cake from the bakery for Stephen. One of the kids put candles on it. We sang Happy Birthday — without Stephen’s favorite cake. He and I were disappointed, but the kids didn’t know the difference. Cake is cake.

Recipe for MaryJo’s Southern Georgia Pound Cake (Recipes from early issues of Gourmet Magazine were always in paragraph style.)

“In the bowl of an electric mixer (note: do not use a hand mixer for this cake) sift together 3 cups each of flour and sugar, 1 cup cocoa, 3 teaspoons baking power, and 1 teaspoon salt. Make a well in the center and add 2 sticks or one cup softened butter (please, not margarine), 1 1/2 cups milk, and 3 teaspoons vanilla. Beat the mixture for 5 minutes. Add 3 eggs, one at a time, and 1/4 cup light cream, beating the mixture thoroughly after each addition. Pour the batter in a well-oiled ten-inch tube pan and bake it in a moderately slow oven (325 degrees F.) for 1 1/2 hours, or until the cake tests done. Cool the cake completely on a wire rack and remove it from the pan.”

Combine a small amount of very strong instant hot coffee, butter which will melt thanks to the hot coffee, and powdered sugar to make a glaze for the cake. If it’s too thick to pour, add more coffee; too thin to stick to the cake, more powdered sugar. (People who hate coffee never complain about the glaze, thanks to the powdered sugar and butter!)

Bon Appetit and many happy birthdays.

My writing focuses on adoption, in addition to words of wisdom for ADHDers. (Not only do I suffer from ADHD, but so do many adopted folks.)

“Shooting Myself in the Foot describes the fear some adopted folks have over going against their parents’ wishes . . or how it took me four years to write a master’s thesis and what I did with it! More adoption stories include Losing the Letters of Willa Cather: An Adoption Story about Unworthiness and the trauma of Losing a Father

You’ll find some tips to help with ADHD: To-Do lists keeps the overwhelm down . . . until you have too many to do lists. Get your To Do List help now. Or read Why I Love ADHD.

No surprise that focus does not come to me easily! In addition to adoption and ADHD, I also write random stories from my life and what I’ve observed.

For Black Lives Matter from a white perspective, see my stories For White Folks from an Old Gray-Haired White Woman with Arthritis. And Teaching Kindergarten at an all-Black school.

You might also like musings on Staying at Home because of COVID 19: The Good, The Bad, and the Not So Ugly.

If you’re a writer or a wannabe writer, take a look at my week of challenges in Writing a Memoir.

Thanks to ADHD, I’m writing two books at the same time: “Finding My Hero: An Adoption Memoir from World War Two” and “Growing Up Adopted: Love Wounded.” (One is the story of my birth-father and his family. The other, the story of the family who adopted and raised me with love . . . and made lots of mistakes. (No family is perfect!)

Watch for my eBook, “The Laundromat Dog.” Coming soon.