Important Pages:

Unknown Cake with Vanilla Sauce

Subject: Here's a challenge for you - hope you can help!
From: Rick
Date: 1/13/2019, 10:39 AM
To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com

On 1/12/2019 3:05 PM, Rick wrote:

Ok, Uncle Phaedrus, I've been looking for a recipe for years and have not been able 
to find it. I don't know what it's called.  But I will try to describe it.

A couple of dessert recipes that are similar would be tres leches cake and old fashioned 
bread pudding, but not either.

The one time I had it was about 35 years ago at a Sunday School fellowship. There was 
a crumbly, coarse cake (similar to corn bread, but sweeter and not actually corn bread) 
involved. The person who brought the dessert broke up the cake into bowls and then 
poured a hot, sweet milk, vanilla and possibly buttery sauce over the broken up cake 
for serving.  Very simple and very good, especially on a cold, Kentucky winter's night.

Do you think you might be able to help me?

Rick

Hello Rick,

I did a lot of searching, but I am having no success at all with this. Clearly this is not just crumbled ordinary cornbread with a sweet vanilla sauce poured over it.

I will post this for reader input.  Perhaps someone has heard of it. More clues would be helpful.

Phaed

On 1/13/2019 11:14 AM, Rick wrote:

Phaed. Thanks for spending time on this. I think the cake was just a simple cake made 
with flour (could have had cornmeal in it, but not sure) and intentionally less sweet and 
dry so that the hot, sweet milk/cream sauce could have a more dramatic effect. I do 
remember the cake was crumbly and not moist. It was also prepared in a single layer 
sheet pan. Was served to me in Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1980’s. The person who 
made it was a senior adult at the time so it may have been passed down from previous 
generations. 

Hi Rick,

Sad to say, if there was no cornmeal in it, that makes finding the particular recipe even more difficult. The less unique a recipe is, the more difficulty there may be in finding it. Many people may serve some kind of cake crumbled into bowls with some kind of vanilla & dairy sauce poured over it, but none of them may be exactly what you had. It could have been day-old pound cake with a generic vanilla sauce. Without a unique name or some unique ingredient, there is no way to tell. It may have even been two separate recipes, one for the cake and an unrelated one for the sweet sauce. If it was a family recipe that existed only in that person's family, then it may be lost.

We'll see what we get.

Phaed

Subject: Unknown cake of 1/14/2019
From: Patricia
Date: 1/16/2019, 1:52 AM
To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com

Dear Phaedrus,
I am wondering if the unknown cake is actually what our family calls Hot Milk Cake. 
It is a light cake, made with plain cake flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs, vanilla, 
milk and butter. Because the eggs are beaten for about 10 minutes, the texture is 
rather like cornbread, which is what made me think of it. I don’t put or make a sauce 
for it but other family members have used lemon curd, confectioners sugar, warm 
cream, even flavored coffee milks. 

Sincerely,
Pat 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Subject:
Re: Rick & his pudding/cake thing
From: Kristin 
Date: 1/18/2019, 1:29 AM
To: phaedrus@hungrybrowser.com

Say Uncle Phaedrus, I was wondering if Rick's mystery dessert wasn't just an ordinary 
trifle. That's what we used to do with day old cakes: break them up, pour pudding over 
them. Or a sauce. I think they were called "trifles", but there's also "parfaits", which I'm 
too lazy to look up the differences. Rick being a man, like a lot of men, they aren't familiar 
with recipes and food- so something they've never tried before or see often would be a 
puzzle to them. I think the practice of pouring a sauce over day old cake, or trifles and 
things, passed out of vogue with the influx of all the cheap snacks we can buy now. 
Not enough women bake, or use leftovers these days (not I! I am old fashioned- always 
have been!)
 
Love your website please keep it going. It's such a fun resource and so interesting.
 
One thing maybe that will help you - or not, While searching for Fig Newton's homemade 
recipe I landed on Imperial Sugar's site. They have a page full of their old old recipe books 
to download entire PDFs for free! VINTAGE books- oldies.
 
 Imperial Sugar
  
who knows maybe our Rick's recipe's there someplace. I'm sure it was just ordinary 
cake with pudding poured on it. It's a popular Pot Luck dish.
 
Oh- PS- I don't know if you read of this already, but the wonderful woman who made the 
site "FoodTimeline" Lynn Olver passed away three years ago?? Her website was- is! 
my alltime favorite food history site Food Timeline
 
You probably already know of that site. If not, be careful as it's too easy to lose a 
valuable portion of one's precious time spent reading so many sorts of historical 
facts on food and recipes. I get a big kick out of it and every time I visit it I find 
something new.
  
Cheers