Julie Richardson - Vintage Cakes: Timeless Recipes for Cupcakes, Flips, Rolls, Layer, Angel, Bundt, Chiffon, and Icebox Cakes for Todays Sweet Tooth

Copyright 2012 by Julie Richardson
Photographs copyright 2012 by Erin Kunkel

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaion Data
Richardson, Julie, 1970
Vintage cakes: timeless recipes for cupcakes, flips, rolls, layer, angel, bundt, chiffon, and icebox cakes for todays sweet tooth / by Julie Richardson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cake. I. Title.
TX771.R527 2012
641.8653dc23
2011041262

eISBN: 978-1-60774-103-9

Cover design by Toni Tajima
Food styling by Robyn Valarik
Prop styling by Ethel Brennan

v3.1

For all my grandmothers.

And for Hazel, who stuck with me
every step of the way and was always ready
when a chance morsel fell to the floor.

A deep thanks to the wonderful folks of Baker & Spice Bakery and SweetWares, for your support and patience while I took time away from the bakery to work in my home kitchen. Thanks too for your honest critique of the many cakes that found their way to the break table. Kathy High, thank you for your contributions to this book. And an extra special thanks to Ashley Claybaugh and Kelly Smith for keeping things running smoothly in my absenceyou both are positively super duper!

I am forever grateful to my recipe testing/tasting team, who were never afraid to say it like it is: Julie Beeler, Karolyn Cross, Gina Fleschner, Laura Gordon, Nellie Hester, Kathie Newbie, Beatrice Pickett, Marguerite Rogers, Barbara Slaughter, Barbara Stollberg, and Lamar White.

A thousand thanks to my dear friend Joy Ellis for helping me pull this book together and bring some order to the stacks of yellow notepads that have littered my kitchen for the past year.

To the amazing people at Ten Speed who honored me with the concept of Vintage Cakes , I offer my sincerest gratitude for trusting me to create the book that you envisioned. Special thanks to Jenny Wapner for her insightful editing, Toni Tajima for her inspired design, and to Ethel Brennan and Robyn Valarik for their vintage styling. Erin Kunkel, you are a true talent! Thanks for sharing your gift of photography with Vintage Cakes .

Finally, this book could never have happened without one person in particular who washed all my dirty dishes, tasted all my trials and errors, went to the store on a moments notice for a forgotten ingredient, and made me wholesome meals to offset all that butter, sugar, and flour we consumed on a daily basis as these recipes took shape. Matt, you are without a doubt the sweetest part of my life! Thank you for always believing in me.

I am blessed to be surrounded and supported by my family, friends, and fellow baking allies thank you all for unknowingly contributing to my work.

S ome peoples obsessions lead them to mountaintops or shoe stores or the racetrack. Mine led me straight to the kitchen. I am a baker. Its my passion; its who I am and what I do. I recognized at an early age the thrill of transforming a few simple everyday ingredients (butter, flour, sugar, eggs) into a delicious creation. This joy is what gets me up in the wee hours of the morning to begin my baking day. I have had the pleasure of owning two small neighborhood bakeries in my career, one in Ketchum, Idaho, and my current endeavor in Portland, Oregon.

When we moved into the space in Portland that is now Baker & Spice Bakery, it had already housed a bakery (the Hillsdale Pastry Shop) for fifty years. In the rush of trying to remodel the space and establish a new business, I hastily dumped the contents of one of their old filing cabinets into a sturdy apple box and pushed it into an empty corner of the attic above the bakery.

Once we were settled in, and after fielding a lot of requests for pink champagne cake from customers devoted to the previous bakery who apparently missed their favorite dessert, I remembered the box in the attic and decided to take it out and see if it contained any recipes. What I found was a vintage junkies dream! The history that poured out of that box sent me back in time. It held a gold mine of baking formulas, journals, and magazines dating back to the 1920s. These were gems from a time when a cupcake was a cup cake, a cookie was a cooky, and the word goober was synonymous with peanut. Bundt pans were still unceremoniously called metal tube pans, and coconut (spelled cocoanut), pineapple, and banana were considered exotic ingredients. Housewives were disciples of Betty Crocker, and no one had heard of Martha Stewart.

When presented with the opportunity to write a book on vintage cakes a few years later, I returned to the treasure trove in the attic and started sifting through old recipes. I borrowed dog-eared cookbooks from family and friends and polled everyone about the cakes they remembered most from their childhoods. Word soon got out about the book, and I started receiving unsolicited recipes (accompanied by lovingly handwritten descriptions of their history) from all over. Everyone was passionate about a cake in their past!

I began to bake and rebake cakes (sometimes as many as six in one day), tinkering with the ingredients to revive and update vintage cake recipes for todays palate. Having tried the original recipes, I can attest that cakes used to be much sweeter than they are today. I cut down on the sugar and upped the flavors in my revised recipes. I also tested and retested a recipe until I found the right amounts of butter (for flavor) and oil (for moisture). My tinkering always included using wholesome, pure ingredients like nuts, oats, fruit, and chocolate in lieu of any inferior ingredients. And since we have so many more high-quality ingredients at our fingertips than cake bakers did a century ago, I had the luxury of being able to update vintage recipes by improving upon the raw materials in the ingredient list.

Every so often, I had the added challenge of attempting to reverse technology: what started in the early twentieth century as a delicious cake made from scratch often became a cake made with a cake mix beginning in the late 1940s. When cake mixes gained popularity, the scratch recipe was sometimes discarded (and lost) in favor of the more efficientbut never tastiercake mix. In this book, I deconstructed a few cake mix classics (like ) to recapture the homemade recipe.

Ive tried to include recipes for everyones palate, from dense dark chocolate to light and airy chiffon to boozy Bundt cake, among others. And in gratitude for the bakery that left me all those vintage recipe cards, Ive also included a slightly revised recipe for , which can, of course, be tinted pink. Its my hope that you enjoy these vintage cakes, and that you find here some heirloom desserts to pass down to future generations.