'Dorothy Brown's Cake' made into a Simple Bundt Cake - An Heirloom Recipe Series

Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another edition of Extra Food Chat with Kath.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting my work. I am so happy to have you here and be able to share more with you.

In this newsletter, I am taking you back to my Heirloom Recipe series (you can find the first recipe here if you missed it), and sharing a recipe I first published in my cookbook Everyday Bakes back in 2020.

The recipe came from my Grandma’s collection and it, along with many others, greatly influenced the recipes that ended up in my cookbook. Which is only fitting as her recipes have influenced my cooking and baking so much over my life.

This recipe began its life as ‘Dorothy Brown’s Cake’, written in pencil in an old notebook. I will never know the exact time period this recipe was written down, but I think it was earlier in my Grandma’s life, maybe during her young adulthood. The notebook looks reminiscent of a school notebook, but I can’t be sure if it was from my Grandma’s time a school, or if it was bought later on.

The notebook is well worn and used, only one part of the cover remains. As with other notebooks with recipes from my Grandma that I now have, they are used sporadically, not from front to back, but some recipes written at the font, middle and back with many blank pages in-between. Some of the pages are coming loose, some of them have already detached from the notebooks spine as it the case with the page containing Dorothy Brown’s Cake recipe.

Dorothy Brown was a relative of my Grandma’s, so this recipe really fits the heirloom recipe criteria! Maybe I am the fourth generation to make this recipe?! Albeit with a few changes - the measurements used in the original recipe aren’t the cups we use for baking today. When I was originally working on this recipe, someone mentioned to me what measurements could have been likely (i.e. using a tea cup or glass to measure out ‘cups’) and sent me a infographic which was very helpful.

The method for the cake simply reads ‘Cream margarine etc’, as you can see above. Possibly the most brief of all recipe methods written down by my Grandma! Luckily I have made many a cake in my time, and possibly there was a similar reason for my Grandma not writing a more detailed method. I assembled the method for the recipe the way I usually would for any cake like this one, and added in some vanilla as I think most cakes deserve a bit of vanilla.