July 4: Yellow Cake with Chocolate Ganache Frosting

My Saturday Cake for the Fourth of July had to be an iconic American cake.  A yellow cake with thick chocolate frosting is so nostalgic that it borders on cliché.  When I was very young I had a Little Golden Book that featured a picnic with a chocolate-frosted, yellow cake.  I cannot remember the title of the book or even the main characters, only the cake and the nifty trick the character in the book used to take the cake on a picnic.  The character packing the picnic basket taped a knife for the cake to the bottom of the cake plate for safe transport.  I don't remember anything else that the folks in the book packed for the picnic.  Sandwiches?  Fried chicken?
All I remember is the cake.

This recipe is from the January 2006 issue of Gourmet.  I remember the reason I clipped it was for the frosting.  I have been on a special chocolate frosting quest for many years.  More indelible than the children's book illustration of a cake with a knife taped to the bottom, is my memory of the chocolate frosting from Rich's Department Store Bakery.

Rich's was an Atlanta landmark with a main store downtown at Five Points and locations at malls in the metro area.  For many decades, Rich's was the store at which you rode the Pink Pig at Christmastime.  As a teen, you took deportment classes in the Juniors' department, or had your "makeup done" for the first time at their cosmetic counter.  As a bride, anywhere in Georgia, you registered for gifts at Rich's, no matter how far you had to drive or take the train.  As an Atlanta matron you had your furs cleaned and stored in the Rich's Fur Vault.  The Rich's Bakery had counters in almost all of the stores and even had a few freestanding bakeries in Atlanta due to the popularity of their products.  They were known for their spectacular, stunningly-white coconut layer cakes.  A Rich's coconut cake was all my Granna requested for Christmas after they moved to Tennessee.  Going to get a cake for Granna (packed in Rich's iconic, cane-pattern-printed, green & white box, tied with white bakery twine) was a prerequisite to every Christmas road trip to her house.

Rich's Bakery Box Design

Better than the coconut cakes, to me, were the cupcakes with chocolate frosting; yellow cake with a shiny chocolate dome.  Sometimes I would get to pick out a cupcake on our way out of the store after a shopping trip.  Often for my birthday, Mom would buy a box of those chocolate cupcakes for me to share with my classmates.  For my seventh birthday, Mom threw a puppet-show-themed birthday party for me at our house.  She built a hinged, tri-fold puppet theatre out of Masonite that was big enough to conceal two or three "puppeteers."  Mom painted the theatre white and trimmed the borders with gold tinsel garland.  She covered the dining room table with piles of puppet materials and each guest got to build a puppet.  Every guest also got a box lunch, packed in a distinctive Rich's Bakery box along with a cupcake.  I kept the puppet theatre for many years; it even became a curbside lemonade stand during some summers.  Rich's was bought by Federated Department Stores years ago and was eventually sold to Macy's.  After the sale to Federated, the Rich's Bakeries were closed and the landscape of Georgia birthdays, weddings and Christmas changed, not for the good.

I have tried to find a comparable chocolate frosting for many years.  Ganache seems to come the closest.  But, Rich's frosting was not applied by dipping the tops of the cupcakes; it was applied generously with a knife or spatula that left a couple of subtle tracks in the chocolate sheen.

Back in 2006, when I clipped this recipe, I neglected to tear out the second page of the directions.  I looked online for the recipe, but had no luck after nine years.  So, my guidance ended when the batter went into the pans.  The baking of the cake layers was no problem, but when I got around to the frosting I had only the list of ingredients and the magazine picture to go by.  I made the ganache the way I have made it in the past; heat the heavy cream to a boil then pour it over the finely-chopped chocolate in a large bowl and still until melted, smooth and shiny.  After that, the frosting needed to cool and then be beaten with a mixer to make it the right consistency to spread and resemble the Gourmet picture.


This ganache frosting was DELICIOUS.  But the cake, though tender, was a little "crumby" for our tastes.  I will stick to my standard 1-2-3-4 cake.  I will keep the frosting "recipe" (such as it is) for other cakes since both the flavor and texture was perfectly rich.  

However, my search for a recipe for the elusive chocolate frosting of my childhood must continue...

 Too bad I haven't found it taped to the bottom of a cake plate.

Next Saturday: Gateau Américan

June 28: Pearl's Banana Cake

Please accept my apology.  This week the Saturday Cake had to be postponed to a Sunday Cake!  It was not due to a scheduling conflict, it was due to the damn bananas not being ripe enough yesterday.  I bought them on Wednesday and expected, with it being summertime, that they would ripen by Saturday.  The bananas showed no trace of ripening on Thursday, so I put them in a produce bag with an apple.  On Friday, when they showed no improvement, I added a second apple and stashed them in a paper bag.  Yesterday, I separated each them from their main stem because my husband read that to keep bananas from getting ripe, one should keep them on their stem together and wrap the stem tightly with plastic wrap.

Finally!  Last night they smelled like ripe bananas, but still had no brown spots.  This morning, behold:  ripe bananas!

This cake recipe comes from my folder of clippings.  It is from the December 2002 issue of Gourmet in the section of recipes received in letters to the magazine.  To tell the truth, I am not entirely sure that I didn't clip the page for the Italian Pot Roast recipe sent by another reader.  But, at some point in the last 13 years, this clipping found itself filed in the "cake" section of the accordion folder.

Top of the cake

Mama Judy used to make a banana cake when my mom was growing up, but we don't know the recipe.  Mom seems to recall that the bananas in Judy's cake filling were mashed and the cake was frosted with seven-minute frosting.

This cake calls for sliced bananas and whipped cream frosting. Everyone at our house loves banana pudding in the summer (actually year-round), so this creamy banana cake seems like a good one to try.  The cake is plain cake, no bananas, and is somewhat reminiscent of a soft, rich, Nilla Wafer .  It is made in two layers with whipped cream and sliced bananas between the layers, then more whipped cream and bananas on top.

The filling between layers.

We all agree that it's a good cake, just not as interesting or as cohesive as we would like.  The cake, the cream and the banana exist on non-intersecting planes - they are too distinct from each other to make a really fine dessert.  Perhaps after a night in the refrigerator, they will meld.  I would like to research the type of banana cake that Judy made and find a suitable version.

But, I think I WILL try that Italian Pot Roast recipe.

Next Saturday: Yellow Cake with Chocolate Ganache Frosting

May 2: Mexican Chocolate Cake

This recipe for Mexican Chocolate Cake is one that has been languishing in my file folder of magazine clippings.  I culled recipes for cakes from the file at the beginning of the year, put them in an envelope and I occasionally pull "a name from the hat" to choose a Saturday Cake.  When I looked through the file a few weeks ago and found this recipe from Gourmet Magazine's April 2004 issue, Keith immediately said "Cinco de Mayo."  Of course!  The Mexican holiday co-opted by Americans as an excuse to devour enchiladas and margaritas is the perfect time to devour cake inspired by Mexican chocolate.

But this week, it is even more important to talk about cocoa and cinnamon. Specifically, a spectacular coffee shop in Durham, North Carolina called Cocoa Cinnamon.  Our friends Leon and Areli started their coffee business as a pushcart in 2010.  In 2013, they built their brick-and-mortar shop in  downtown Durham (just down the block from the old Durham Bulls' ballpark) with funding through friends and Kickstarter.

Cocoa Cinnamon uses sustainable and locally-sourced supplies in their products.  The signature drinks are often inspired-by and incorporate ingredients traditional to native cultures of the Americas.  The atmosphere is welcoming and cozy, and all of the employees are upbeat and happy to be there.  Leon and Areli believe strongly in supporting their employees with a living wage, and they encourage other businesses to do the same.  They contribute some of their profits to local charities.  They promote local businesses and civic involvement.  They will even give a free coffee to anyone who is unable to pay.  Cocoa Cinnamon is doing everything right as a small business.  They were just ranked by Buzzfeed as #7 in their "24 U.S. Coffee Shops to Visit Before You Die."

Cocoa Cinnamon has commenced a capital campaign to raise funds to complete their second location in Durham.  Please visit their page at Community Sourced Capital and become a Squareholder.  The "square" you purchase is not a donation, it is a loan.  Cocoa Cinnamon is trying to raise $30,000 by May 19th.  When you are in Durham, do not miss an opportunity to visit them and have the best caffeine fix of your life.

My See-Line Woman latte, flavored with chocolate and blackstrap molasses (foreground) with
Colin's Cacao Canele hot chocolate and lemon square on the patio at Cocoa Cinnamon

Deepest, darkest cocoa mixture

Cocoa and cinnamon are two of the distinctive ingredients in this Saturday Cake.  The cake contains Dutch-process cocoa, which makes a very dark cake with more complex flavor than regular cocoa.  It also contains a small dose of ground cinnamon which gives it a faintly spicy depth.  There is a significant amount of vanilla extract (2 tablespoons) compared to most cakes.

The thick glaze caused a few crevices in the tender cake

The glaze is made from pecans and bittersweet chocolate;  it's truly delicious but is less like a glaze and more like a bumpy frosting.  The recipe states that the chef, from Rather Sweet Bakery who devised the cake, uses the recipe for bundt cakes and cupcakes.  The cake is very moist and exceedingly tender, too tender I believe, for the heavy pecan-laden glaze.




When I make this recipe again, and the clamoring fans around here say I must, I will make cupcakes.


Next Saturday:  Queen of Sheba (Reine de Saba)

February 28: Mace Cake

My Saturday Cake resolution has been an opportunity to chip away at procrastination by preparing some recipes that had interested me, but had languished in a vintage book or in a file folder of magazine clippings.  Today's mace cake recipe comes from the April 2005 issue of Gourmet and was a submission to the magazine by Cynthia Knauer from Pennsylvania.

Betty, Jackie and Pat with my mother

The recipe appealed to me for two reasons.  The first reason is that I had never heard of anyone but my cousin Betty baking with mace.  Betty was one of three sister cousins who grew up across the street from my mother in the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta.  These three sisters were much like older sisters to my mother who was an only child.  As such, they were always more like aunts to me than the type of distant cousins most people have.

Betty was pretty and blonde and always seemed sophisticated in her tastes; she was a career woman, she smoked cigarettes like a movie star, she had italian marble lamps in her living room, she collected perfume bottles on a curio shelf in her bathroom, she painted china, and traveled around the world with her china painting club.  When I was in middle school, she would invite me over to spend the night on Thanksgiving and the two of us would get up before daybreak to shop the after-Thanksgiving sales (something my mother would never do).

Betty often flavored her pound cakes with mace.  In the 1980's, my only knowledge of mace was as a spray repellant to muggers on television.  So, the first time she offered me some, I was a little apprehensive.  But the cake was as fragrant, elegant and unique as Betty herself.  She passed away five years ago last month and I was unable to attend her funeral because I was in the hospital for my first hip replacement.  I thought of her instantly when I pulled this recipe from my folder of clippings.

Elizabeth "Betty" Babb Cook

I was interested to learn that mace is actually part of the nutmeg fruit, from which both mace and nutmeg are made,  The fruit itself is about the size of a golf ball. Nutmeg, which is ground and used at our house for potato gratin and for crowning bourbon-spiked eggnog, is the woody seed at the core of the nutmeg.  Surrounding the seed, is a dark red web of fibers which is dried and ground to produce mace.  While mace does taste and smell similar to nutmeg, I think it is mild and has a more woodsy, balsam-like undertone like cardamom.

A little heavy-handed with the sprinkling lower right side!

The other reason this recipe caught my eye was its bizarre technique.  Instead of creaming the butter and sugar as the base of the batter, the eggs and sugar are beaten to triple their volume.  The milk and butter are brought to a boil as the mixer works on the eggs and sugar.  To the egg mixture, the dry ingredients are added.  Then, the hot milk and butter are poured into the batter.  I have never made a cake like this!  I always feared adding hot liquid to any mixture containing eggs lest I end up with a bowl of scrambled eggs.

No scramble resulted, of course, this is a Gourmet tested recipe. The batter was very thin, like pancake batter and it was topped before baking by a sprinkling of sugar and mace.

The sugar mixture created a golden crust as the cake baked and the kitchen was filled with buttery-rich exotic fragrance.  Daughter Autumn proclaims it the best Saturday Cake, to date.  I love the crunchy crust and the fantastic ease of the recipe - it came together in a snap and baked for 30 minutes.


I kept half of the cake for my family (and folks who visit).  The other half I plated up and took to Betty's sister, Pat.  Pat had been in the hospital for three weeks rehabilitating from a terrible fall.  She is now at home and recuperating very well.  Her daughter Liz is just about the closest thing I have to a sister as we are both only-children.  It has been a very stressful few weeks for Liz.  So after many days of relieving her for spells at the hospital, I was able to make a purely social call to Pat's house today bearing cake for the family.

Next Saturday:  Lemon Cheese Cake

January 24: Allgood Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Up until my fourth-grade year, I had been a Montessori child.  I began public school that year highly prepared academically and behaviorally.  I was, however, wholly unprepared for lunch in a school cafeteria.  My mother had been sending me to Montessori school with a lovely, balanced, healthy lunch every day.  I carried a hand-painted, metal lunch pail filled with good food and a cloth napkin (color coordinated with the pail).  My lunches had contained sandwiches on whole grain bread along with Dannon yogurt that had been frozen the night before to defrost by lunchtime.  My homemade lunches never contained any treats but fruit.  In an effort to fit in, I left my lunch pail at home and opted to buy lunch and milk at my new school.

I was pretty surprised when a square slice of pizza served with canned corn and my choice of (chocolate!) milk was handed to me on a plastic tray by a lady in a hair net.  But I will never forget the shock I received the first day the cafeteria offered Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.  My homeroom teacher read the lunch menu aloud during morning announcements and I was thrilled that one of my absolute favorite desserts was on offer that day!  At lunchtime, I stared down the line of stainless steel and glass, past whatever entree and side dish was being served and saw the craziest-looking Pineapple Upside-Down Cake I had ever seen.  It was just YELLOW CAKE with some pineapple slices and sad cherries!  Dubious, I tasted the alleged Pineapple Upside-Down Cake anyway.  More is the pity.  That cake tasted just as boring as it looked; it wasn't real Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

I chalked-up the disappointment to the public school experience, alongside field day and having to learn to play "Suicide is Painless" on the recorder.  It took years of real-world experience for me to realize that the divine upside-down cake I had eaten before fourth grade was an outlier made only by the ladies in my family.

My great-grandmother, Judith Allgood Page, made a dessert every Sunday for midday dinner.  It was usually a simple dessert like a chess pie, banana pudding or strawberry shortcake made with store-bought sponge cake cups.  But in the wintertime, she often made Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and served it with whipped cream.  Her cake was made with rich, spicy gingerbread cake and a gooey layer of glazed pineapple rings and cherries.  When I was growing up there was a delicious gingerbread cake mix made by Dromedary that made upside-down cake easier.

When I started cooking on my own, I searched for the Dromedary mix in its distinctively retro orange/yellow/white box.  I had a terrible time trying to find it, so I gave up and started a quest for an alternative from scratch.  In the October 2000 issue of Gourmet magazine, I found the perfect recipe in the "Letters From Our Readers" section.  Mrs. Lindsay's Gingerbread Cake recipe makes my ideal Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

Pan prepped with butter, brown sugar,
pineapples, cherries

My mother always made her upside down cake in a square pan.  A square pan seems more gingerbread-y than a round pan or the cast iron frying pan some upside-down cake recipes recommend.  As I prepared to bake, I was disappointed not to find my square cake pan.  (Some of my excessive collection of cooking implements are packed away in storage.  Our last house had an enormous kitchen and my collection had grown to a size that our current home cannot possibly support.)

The final product

I figured, the square pan is packed away and more cake is never a problem so, I doubled the recipe and used my 9x13x2" pan instead.



The entire house smells like a warm, spicy heaven.  I served each slice with lightly-sweetened whipped cream.

There is plenty for leftovers; some for the neighbors and a special slice for Mom.

Next Saturday:  Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake