Okay, so I’m an American woman of a ‘certain age’ and it seems to me that the names we use for cakes are pretty straightforward descriptions. E.g. yellow cake, chocolate cake, pineapple upside down cake. About as oblique as we get is “Devil’s Food Cake” and “Angel Cake.”
Over the last few years watching the Great British Baking Show, I’ve been amazed at how many different cakes they seem to have with utterly opaque names. I mean, Victorian Sponge? Madeira Cake? Eccles cake? Battenburg Cake? There’s no way an outsider comes across that on a menu and has a guess what it will look like/contain – though of course all the bakers on the show just nod happily when the challenge is announced.
But just lately I was introduced to an American exception, the Lane cake. (It’s a layered cake involving raisins, pecans and coconut, apparently.) And yesterday a fellow volunteer said she was going to bake a Butterfly cake. I didn’t have much time to followup with her, but apparently it’s a specific kind of cake (with pineapple and coconut) rather than just an ordinary cake shaped like or decorated with butterflies.
So now I’m wondering: are there a bunch of other American cakes my plain-spoken family just never ate/heard of? Regional specialties, maybe? Do we have enough I could do a Cake of the Month challenge?
There is German Chocolate cake, which doesn’t have anything to do with Germans or the country. It is named after Samuel German who developed the cooking formulation for dark chocolate.
Lady Baltimore cake, a light yellow layer cake with boiled frosting including chopped dried fruit and nuts. Popular a hundred years ago in Charleston, South Carolina.
Owen Wister (author of The Virginian wrote a novel called Lady Baltimore about Charleston society, in which the cake acted as the Madeleine in Proust.
If pies were to count, we sure have a lot of inscrutable ones. It seems like whenever I travel through the Midwest and South, there’s some new pie I’ve never heard of. Maybe we save our creative names for pies (e.g. shoo-fly, Mississippi mud, Derby, chess, Montgomery, etc. though some of these actually do have cake variations.)
I think it’s egg yolk, not dye, that makes yellow cake yellow. But it’s a pretty generic sort of cake, regardless, and probably the most common sort of “just plain cake” in the US.
And in the Lane cake, don’t forget that it’s soaked in booze.
My wife and I (a Brit and an American) had a similar conversation following our GBBO watch-fest. Several of the British “cakes” would be more akin to brownies or scones (e.g. Eccles cakes). In terms of “true” cakes, the typical British home cook would only really do the classic sponge, the fruitcake, maybe a lemon cake, so they’re not starting with that much more variety - but they call some things “cakes” that we wouldn’t. So if you allow brownies et al. you’ll have plenty to draw from.
My favorite cookbook in the universe, A World of Baking by Delores Cassella, was published in 1968 and is a treasure trove of authentic American baking. Her cake chapter includes, along with several of the ones mentioned above and a lot of cakes with self-evident titles (Jewish honey cake, graham cracker cake, etc.):
Pennsylvania Dutch funny cake
Marguerite cake
Wacky cake
Colonial Tipsy cake
Scripture cake
Hartford election cake
Robert E. Lee’s cake
Woo hoo! 12 cakes with names already suggested! A couple I knew of (German Chocolate, Boston Cream Pie) but so many more, I think I absolutely will do a Cake of the Month thing. Hubby is on board for participating, on the consuming rather than producing end.
Keep 'em coming, please! More possibilities always welcome!
Probably depends on the particular recipe. The classic ones are definitely egg yolk colored, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some more “modern” ones use food coloring.
