A winning recipe for election cake

October 20, 2020 12:00 am • Last Updated: October 20, 2020 12:03 pm

By Lee White
Columnist

What will we be doing the week before the Nov. 3, 2020, election? According to Dr. Walter Woodward, professor of history at the University of Connecticut and Connecticut State Historian, it might be good to make a cake and, possibly, win an award.

Woodward writes that the first documented election cake, in 1771, was called a “muster cake,” served to convince men to turn out for wartime drill and practice formations. The first election cake found in a American cookbook was Amelia Simmons’ “American Cookery,” published in Hartford in 1789. We won that war, you remember.

A newer recipe Woodward received is “Modern Election Cake Recipe,” and it looks like half birthday cake, half fruit cake. It calls for yeast, some butter and buttermilk (the latter one of my favorite add-ins for all cakes) vanilla, eggs, and so on. Like a fruit cake, you add golden raisins and a quarter cup of dried fruit. And, like a yeast bread, the batter must be allowed to rise for 1 ½ hours in a Bundt cake. I kept thinking how difficult it would be for that yeast to do its job, rising with all that heavy fruit pushing it down. Also, like a fruit cake, it is topped with a glaze.

I am not terribly fond of fruit cake. I think about that joke about fruit cake: you know, there is only one fruit cake, and it just gets re-sent every year.

Now, however, there is an election cake contest, and Adam Young, of Mystic’s Sift Bakery, is a judge. To submit your cake, you can use any cake and frost it however you like. It cannot be partisan (no cake frosted red, nor frosted blue, no Trump or Biden banners on top, nor bunting around its perimeter). If you want to your cake to win, it must be photographed no more than three different ways, and sent in by Monday, Oct. 26.

In any case, for your Nov. 3 election get-together (social distancing and masks, please), make any cake you like, frost or glaze it with five-minute icing, chocolate icing or buttercream. You might make this cake from Southern Living. I would drizzle it with dark chocolate. You could make it as cupcakes. If you frost it, you might use a pure extract in the frosting, almond or vanilla. What the heck, it’s your house; paint the frosting blue or red!

Million Dollar Pound Cake

From Southern Living magazine

Yield: serves 10 to 12

1 pound butter, softened

3 cups sugar

6 large eggs

4 cups all-purpose flour (White Lily if you have it)

¾ cups milk

1 teaspoon almond extract

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Beat butter at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy and lighter in color, 1 to 7 minutes depending on the power of your mixer. Gradually add sugar, beating at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until yellow yolk disappears.

Add flour to creamed mixture alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour. Bear at low speed until mixture blends after each addition. (The batter should be smooth and bits of flour should be well incorporated to rid batter of lumps.) Stir gently with a rubber spatula. Stir in extracts.

Pour into a greased and floured 10-inch pad. (I use Pam cooking spray with flour; it is in the blue can at the supermarket.)

Bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour and 40 minutes, or until a long wooden pick inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from pan and cool completely on a wire rack.