Just Cake

Just Cake was "written and made up by Lucie Olmstead". An original!

This one pretty much sums up my Midwestern upbringing. Get it done, make it good, then move on because there's a lot of work to do. When you have 6-7-8 mouths to feed and firewood to get and cows to milk and bills to pay, there is no time to fuss over the food. Be thankful you have some.

So here's your Just Cake: no expensive ingredients, no complicated techniques.  

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar                                                

1 TBL shortening (medium)                        

1 egg                                             

⅔ cup sweet milk                                       

1 ½ cup flour (more or less)                       

1 ½ tsp baking powder                             

Flavoring and salt             

There were no instructions with this one, so I followed the theme and decided to just mix it all together. If you want to get fancy, you can follow the standard cake-mixing routine: cream sugar and fats together, add the egg, then alternately add liquid and dry ingredients until just mixed. Bake in a 9" square or 8" round cake pan at 350° for 30 minutes.

In the printable version I've cleared up some of the random measurements for you.

I can't give you a review yet, but the batter was good. Here it is all baked and ready for the freezer:

Why the freezer, you ask? Because I baked it on Monday in preparation for the Grand Bake Sale this Saturday to benefit Issy Stapleton's treatment. (Read about the Stapleton's here. To donate and for updates on fundraising go here. ) Because stale cake just won't do, I'll be baking all week, freezing, and frosting on Friday night. 

This one's waiting for the Caramel Frosting that I've been dreaming about all week. Next up: Salad Dressing Cake. 

Lunch with the Sisters

Last week Lucie's sisters gathered for lunch at my parents' house. They brought along their stories and answers to many of my questions, and better yet, Aunt Ilene brought a stack of recipes! A couple were Lucie's originals, saved over the decades in my grandmother's original handwriting:

Lucie's Salad Dressing Cake was a family favorite. I also found out that Sunshine Cake, one recipe in the notebook, was always made on childhood birthdays.

An original recipe page with recipes for Molasses Cookies and Noodles. I love the food stains-- proof that they were used over and over again. And note the options for flavoring "based on what you had to use", according to my Aunts.

But the best find of the day was Lucie's chart for everyday baking. It's a simple 5-ingredient cheat sheet for biscuits, shortcake, meat piecrust, and dumplings:

Cool, eh? I need this in my life, and so do you. Here's a printable version.

So thank you Aunt Helen, Aunt Sally, Aunt Ilene, and Mom for your time this afternoon. And Aunt Alice and Aunt Edna, you were missed (but I enjoyed your creamed corn Edna!). Stay tuned for more stories about the women behind the recipes.

Honey Cookies

Mmmm, honey. I could talk about my favorite sweetener all day, but let's just get to the point:

Mary Dexter’s Honey Cookies

Sept. 1, 1949

Best dipped in coffee. These reminded me of a miniature coffee cake, perfect for a quiet morning and a good book.

Ingredients

1 cup honey

½ cup shortening or softened butter

1 egg

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

*Vanilla

*Flour to drop

Cream honey and butter together. Add the egg and vanilla. Sift the remaining ingredients together and add to the mixture. Drop onto cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes at 350°.

*A Note About the Random

So here's where a 1940's housewife just winged it. She went by feel and didn't treat a recipe like a chemistry experiment.  I am not a 1940's housewife. I am an Instruction Follower, and if something doesn't tell me exactly what to do I get a little panicky. 

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like we need to be told how to do most things these days. We want exact directions and reassurance that we won’t fail.

Or maybe we just don’t spend as much time in the kitchen with our busy modern lives. Maybe we don’t have the experience to just know these things. 

In any event, I went with it and guessed at 1 tsp. vanilla and 2½ cups of flour. It worked out fabulous. This little foray into Not Following Instructions reminded me that I can trust myself. A little bit.

Just the right consistency for drop cookies