VINTAGE: 1970's Apple-Carrot-Raisin Cake

If you have a sweet tooth then this apple-carrot-raisin cake with a load of cinnamon thrown in for good measure is one for you. It's another of my dug out and re-found vintage recipes - one found among a group of Detroit Free Press newspaper recipe clippings. While this is one undated, the rest all dated from the 1970's so I'm throwing caution to the wind and dating this to the same age.

As in it's description it's very much a pudding cake, it's moist and sweet and with the nutmeg and cinnamon has a festive feel for this time of year. While it only calls for 1/4 of a cup of butter (or marg) the apples and the carrots keep it amazingly moist even though it looks like sawdust before you place it into the oven.

It's one of those awesome bakes that doesn't take too long to put together (bar all the cutting up) and you can happily got watch your favorite show while it bakes away. I love how crispy the sugary lemon juice glaze makes it and finishes it off perfectly.

So if you're all fed up of Christmas cake, and pudding and have some left over carrots, give this a go and let me know how it turns out!

FOOD: A Vintage Spice Cake

Cookbooks, especially vintage ones tend to be modest in selling their recipes. Recipe names are simple, straight forward and pretty much to the point. So it's rare for them to state "exceptionally good" within the directions, yet alone the title. As I love all things spice I would have tried this recipe, but an "exceptionally good" spice cake, well that got me baking it all the quicker. 

The recipe comes from an old Calumet Baking Powder booklet, one very well loved and used over the years before I came across it at an estate sale. It's so well loved that the first 13 pages are missing so while I can't precisely age it, it's very 1930's in style. I admit I have issues, I can't throws things like this out, they might be falling apart but if I can save them I will, if I can use them, even better.

Vintage recipes can be a little tricky to work with - I mean even this one didn't give me a baking temperature or time but it worked out great. Plus my favorite with vintage recipes - they rarely call for any strange ingredients, sometimes one's that may be tricky to find, but not this one.

So this spice cake is prefect and seasonal what with the nutmeg and cinnamon. It's super moist, so moist you don't even need a frosting on the top. Perfect!

Spice Cake - Exceptionally Good

1/2 cup of butter

1 cup of sugar
2 cups of flour

2 level teaspoons of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

Pinch of salt

3/4 of a cup of cold water

Yolks of four eggs or two whole ones

Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly and add in the eggs. Sift the flour with the baking powder, spices and salt. Alternate mixing in the water and the flour mix into the creamed butter. Bake in a square pan at 350F for 45 minutes until slightly golden.

But was it an exceptionally good spice cake?

Well yes, yes it actually was.

FOOD: Vintage Coffee Drop Cookies

Everyone loves a cookie right? Thing is i'm not the best at baking them, they never end up gooey or chewy enough for my liking. But after seeing so many other the blogpshere in the last couple of weeks I thought it was high time I tried baking some again. Maybe things are starting to improve, or this is just a really tasty recipe, either way they are worthy baking again. 

Carrying along with my new vintage recipe feature, this recipe for coffee drop cookies comes out of the pages of the McCall's Cookie Collection printed back in 1972 and rather than being just a plain old cookie, has as very tasty icing. It originally called for walnuts instead of chocolate chips, but my cupboards dictate what gets thrown into the bowl - that's half the fun. 

To the recipe we go!

Coffee Drop Cookies

1/2 cup of butter

1/2 cup of sugar

1 egg

2 tablespoons of instant coffee

1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

1/4 cup of milk

1/2 cup of chocolate chips

For the icing;

2 cups of confectioners sugar

1/4 cup of cold coffee

3 tablespoons of butter

1 tablespoon of cocoa

The cookie dough is pretty straight forward to make - you mix your butter and sugar together, adding in the egg and mixing until all light and fluffy. After dissolving the instant coffee in two tablespoons of hot water, add that into your mix. Take your flour in one bowl and your milk in another, and alternatively mix them into the butter/egg mix. 

Take about a tablespoon of mixture at a time and place them onto a baking sheet, place into a preheated oven at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes until you start to see that lightly browned topping to the cookies. Once cooked place on a wire rack and leave to cool.

Then mix together your icing - adding the sugar and coffee alternatively to the butter. Finally add in the coffee and mix well. 

I'll be honest, I did eat a cookie as soon as they came out of the oven unglazed and you couldn't go without icing them at all, but I find the icing with the added coffee certainly brings out the flavor a little more, which for me can only be a good thing. Granted they are particularly gooey, or even overly chewy, but I can deal without that, they taste good enough as they are although they might be a little too coffee based if the coffee flavor isn't your thing, the taste isn't subtle.

How do you like your cookies?

FOOD: Rhubarb Cake

Finally rhubarb season has rolled around again (yey!), so it's time to get stocked up and get baking. I can never turn down a good old fashioned rhubarb crumble with a huge dollop of custard. Sadly rhubarb has a bit of a bad reputation - many find it a little too sour to be enjoyable and others love it for that reason alone, plus it's a really good source of fibre and vitamins (score!). So to offer something a little different, I thought i'd start the rhubarb baking season with a cake, because everyone loves cake right?!

Like the banana cake recipe, this cake is taken from the 1990 Hometown Collection (I told you it was becoming a favorite) with this particular recipe credited from the Exclusively Rhubarb Cookbook - a charity cookbook from Coventry, Connecticut. Again it's a pretty straight forward recipe and doesn't call for anything you probably don't already have (bar the rhubarb). 

So, to the recipe!

You'll need;

• 1/2 cup of butter (softened)
• 1 1/2 cups of white sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 cups of all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1 cup of milk
• 3 cups of finely chopped rhubarb - this works out at being about 6 average sized stalks
• Sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling 

Cream your butter and after a good mixing, add into your white sugar gradually, finishing off with adding in the egg and mixing well. Seperately add the flour, soda and salt. Alternating with the milk (I should probably add the recipe called for buttermilk but I never have that so go with whatever you have) add the dry mix into the mix. Finally add in the chopped up rhubarb. 

Pour the mix into a greased and lined 13 x 9 x 2" baking tray and sprinkle over the cinnamon and sugar - as much or as little as you'd like. Pop the tray into a preheated oven (350F) for 45 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clear.

The result is a lovely moist, surprisingly sweet but with a delightful taste of rhubarb and the cinnamon with sugar topping leaves a crisp warm winter taste in your mouth. The rhubarb does keep the cake a little soggy even after being cooked so it won't last too long but it freezes perfectly so your batch can be happily divided up and saved. 

How do you like your rhubarb? Lover or a hater?