Coca-Cola Cake

two great tastes that taste like something together

Schatzi: Let’s start off Bake Week with a bang, shall we? And by bang, I mean with a an odd little recipe that happens to taste delightful! I’m talking about Coca-Cola Cake. Being lovers of Coke and fascinated by odd desserts, Eli and I have been hankering to try one of these babies out for quite a while, so I decided to just up and bake one. I used a clipped newspaper recipe I found in the pages of my Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook, which has several recipe cards and clippings stuffed in it, some clippings dated 1970, others dated 1984, all originating in Florida. This was an undated clipping. I looked into Cola Cakes over at the Food Timeline, and would guess that they were indeed a company-manufactured phenomenon. The recipe in my clipping is identical to the one at the Timeline, as well as one published by the Coca-Cola Company, and one found in the White Trash Cookbook. So it’s apparently a very common recipe.

The result is actually very good, but very sweet. The cake itself isn’t too sweet or too chocolatey, but has a faint caramel-like flavor. The icing, on the other hand, is incredibly sweet and fudgelike. But the two go well together; everyone that tried it liked it quite a bit. I was also amazed at the way the marshmallows simply baked into the cake, making it extra silky and springy. One thing: I wouldn’t try it with Pepsi, which to my mind is sweeter and less caramel-tasting than Coke or RC.

a piece of Coca-Cola Cake

Hot Fudge Pudding Cake

Sylvia Lovegren dates the popularity of the pudding cake to the Forties, though that popularity declined in the Sixties when all things old-fashioned were scorned for space age chic. My mother used to make a chocolate pudding cake very similar to this one, differing only slightly in how the ingredients were put together, but my sister has her recipe box, so I used the recipe Lovegren adapted from 1946’s The California Cookbook. Their spongy, cakelike tops floating over thick, gooey sauces make pudding cakes perfect for a cold, wet fall or winter when served right out of the oven. The Oregonian’s FoodDay printed some “upscale” versions last spring, which I cut out to try sometime.Men and children are especially fond of this hot fudge pudding cake.

Tunnel of Fudge Cake

the Tunnel of Fudge

Schatzi: My Fourth of July was spent doing a few of the traditional activities: participating in a cookout, eating kosher all-beef hot dogs, drinking beer, and socializing. I also baked a cake for the occasion, a very American cake, the Tunnel of Fudge Cake. The Tunnel of Fudge Cake is the cake that put the Bundt cake on the map and probably the recipe most associated with the Pillsbury Bake-Off—though it came in second place that year. (The first place winner of 1966 was Golden Gate Snack Bread, a yeast bread made with instant flour, processed cheese spread, dry onion soup mix and butter, which no one ever heard about again.) Once bakers saw the stunning Tunnel of Fudge Cake in Pillsbury ads, they went nuts for the cake—and the pan in which it came.

The Bundt cake is very representative of an American mishmash of cultures, starting out as an adaptation of Jewish and Central European baking by Scandinavians. David and Dottie Dalquist, founders of Nordic Ware, created the Bundt pan in 1950, based on a ceramic kugelhopf mold brought to them by some Hadassah ladies wanting a lighter weight metal version. They named it Bundt, from the German “Bund” or gathering, patented it, and that was that—at least until Ella Helfrich and the Tunnel of Fudge made the scene, making the Bundt cake a ubiquitous part of the America’s culinary landscape in the Sixties and Seventies: “By 1972 the grand prize winner in the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest was a Bundt Streusel Spice Cake and eleven top winners also called for a Bundt pan; that same year Pillsbury sold $25 million worth of its new Bundt cake mixes.”[i] Everyone in America was baking with Bundt pans, producing all manner of cakes.