Red Velvet Cake/other Southern cakes

[Gifted Gourmet]

WHile we're on the subject of Southern desserts, does anyone have a kickass recipe for Dr. Pepper cake? Man, I love that cake -- moist, sweet, with a cooked-flour and crisco frosting. I would love to make it again and relive happy moments from my childhood.

http://www.cookingindex.com/public/Recipes/des/des12.asp

[Varmint]

Looking through my copy of Marion Brown's "The Southern Cook Book" (1951), I found recipes for the following cakes, which purport to be Southern:

Lane Cake

Robert E. Lee Cake

Lady Baltimore Cake

Sally White Cake

Jennie Benedict's Rum Cake

Williamsburg Orange Wine Cake

Tennessee Jam Cake

Georgia Pecan Whiskey Cake

Kentucky Pecan Bourbon Cake

Tarboro Tipsy Cake

Southern Hot Milk Cake

God, I love this cook book!

[Gifted Gourmet]

Surely this particular recipe originated somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, ya'll ....

http://www.recipegoldmine.com/cakemixcake/cakemix47.html

[dlc]

Surely this particular recipe originated somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, ya'll ....

http://www.recipegoldmine.com/cakemixcake/cakemix47.html

Reminds me of countless potluck suppers at church all during my childhood. An overload of Cool Whip, fruit and sugar. If only it would taste as good as I thought it did 50 yrs ago.

[Lan4Dawg]

as I read through this topic I was thinking about grabbing Marion Brown's Southern Cook Book just before I saw Varmint's post. It has become one of my favorite books as well. If you are lucky enough to have a copy (mine was inherited fr/ my 96 year old great aunt a few years back) of Mrs. S.R. Dull's Southern Cooking then you have a treat. Mrs. Dull was food editor for the Atlanta Journal & her book dates fr/ 1928 and includes everything fr/ Mahogany Cake to Japanese Fruit Cake to Black Fruit Cake to Georgia Date Cake to Henrietta's Sunshine Cake. On the same subject many of the cakes mentioned are also included in John Edge's compendium A Gracious Plenty (which I would link to Amazon if I could remember how).

Back to the original subject, does anyone remember the Coconut cakes fr/ Rich's bakery in Atlanta (the department store)? The Rev, a coconut cake afficianado if ever there was one, swore by those cakes. Unfortunately Rich's no longer has a bakery & I have never asked about the receipt. I assume it is the same or similar to Nathalie DuPree's as she was the head of their cooking school forever.

I keep thinking of family cake stories as I type and they bring back some very fond memories.

[therese]

Not only is there no longer a bakery at Rich's, there isn't even a Rich's at Rich's: Federated's collapsed Macy's (which used to be Davison's, remember?) and Rich's in to a single entity (called Rich's-Macy's) and closed some of the stores.

[Lan4Dawg]

oh how well I know!

at least they have the pink pig back! so all is relatively well w/ the world.

HDHD

[Gifted Gourmet]

oh how well I know!

at least they have the pink pig back! so all is relatively well w/ the world.

HDHD

But, with the recent arrival of Bloomies to Atlanta, who misses the old Rich's and Macy's??

[phlawless]

At Mag Grill in Durham we did a version of a red velvet using beets as the coloring. Not quite as electric as the red dye kind, but they added an incredible texture. And our coca cola cake just came off the menu last night: also very good, but I did it at home with cheerwine; even better!

[balmagowry]

At Mag Grill in Durham we did a version of a red velvet using beets as the coloring. Not quite as electric as the red dye kind, but they added an incredible texture.

In a desultory way I have continued researching this since I last weighed in here - can't help itl these "grass roots" recipes with no clearly identifiable source just scream out for investigation - and it really does appear that this was the original coloring/texturing agent. Will post more on the subject once I get my notes organized - meanwhile, the discussion on this thread may be of interest. Apparently we had a Red Velvet Cake Czar on eGullet, as recently as last year!

[Gifted Gourmet]

meanwhile, the discussion on this thread may be of interest. Apparently we had a Red Velvet Cake Czar on eGullet, as recently as last year!

As usual, I remain dazzled with your research skills and general brilliance, balmagowry! Thank you for the link to last year's posting on classic cakes! There goes my Saturday afternoon, now completely shot to hell ...

[balmagowry]

meanwhile, the discussion on this thread may be of interest. Apparently we had a Red Velvet Cake Czar on eGullet, as recently as last year!

As usual, I remain dazzled with your research skills and general brilliance, balmagowry!

Research? Oy, dahlink, that was mostly the result of some heavily exaggerated googling, is all - even the eGullet thread, I'm embarrassed to say. At any rate, we're getting a little forrarder. Got the Waldorf cookbook yesterday, and there's certainly no RVC in the TOC, though I can't swear there isn't in the text. It's not in the index, though. What's curious is the conflicting versions of how and when the story got started, and of how the Waldorf reacted; this is the stuff I haven't got in order yet, and I have a sneaking feeling that when that happens there will be some sort of a pattern to it. We shall see.

Thank you for the link to last year's posting on classic cakes! There goes my Saturday afternoon, now completely shot to hell ...

Any time, kiddo. Heh heh. Comes with the territory.

[Dana]

Pound Cake is a standard in my part of the South. Any flavor, lemon, plain, chocolate, whatever. I really don't like them, they are so dense. I prefer a lighter cake. I know several families that make no other kind of cake other than pound.

As for Red Velvet, I grew up in Kansas, which is decidedly NOT the south, and we had it a lot - it was my sister's requested B-day cake. The recipe called for 2 bottles of red food coloring, and my frugel mother used one, then filled the bottle with water to wash it out for the other. No noticeable difference.

[ludja]

I made a Huguenot Torte from Bill Neal's Southern Cooking this past weekend for a friends birthday. It is a southern cake that has been on my list to make ever since I bought the cookbook 15 or so years ago. Bill Neal mentioned that it was one of his favorite cakes which added even more to the allure.

It's a great cake! The cake layers have finely chopped apples and ground pecans in them. Unlike many nut cakes, the eggs are not separated. Rather, they are whipped very well with the sugar before adding the flour, nuts and apples. They baked up beautifully.

The filling is simply sweetened whipped cream with vanilla. Per the recipe suggestion I decorated the top with rosettes of whipped cream and glazed pecans. It's a nicely rich cake but is light at the same time as there is no butter in the cake layers and no frosting other than the whipped cream.

[Sarabeth]

Looking through my copy of Marion Brown's "The Southern Cook Book" (1951), I found recipes for the following cakes, which purport to be Southern:

Lane Cake

Georgia Pecan Whiskey Cake

God, I love this cook book!

←

I can see why you love that book!

Might you be willing to share these two recipes? I am particularly looking for Lane Cake recipes if anyone else has a recipe they know and love.

Personally, I have always had great success with a Blue Willow Coca-cola cake with boiled peanut frosting. Ah, it is good to live in the South.

[racheld]

Have a look at Ling's slightly-frosted Red Velvet, in the Ling/Henry blog. It's a gorgeous, deep maroon, shining at the edges, moist and satiny. And if that's not enough fabric comparison, it's probably smooth as silk.

She's got her G.R.I.T.S. credentials, just on that one cake.