The Birthday Cake

Long about Christmas of 1963, when I was a freshman in high school, some old friends of my parents came for an afternoon's visit.  As newly weds, Mom and Dad had spent a lot of time with Fern and Andy Goin, and the joke was always about the "Cummings and the Goins."  On this particular Saturday, Fern gave Mom a copy of the Peck Cookbook, one of those community cookbooks full of everyone's best recipes.  I had fun looking through it and came upon a recipe called Poor Man's Cake.  Of course the title intrigued me, and when I mentioned it, Dad said his Grandmother had made that cake for his birthdays when he was growing up.  Well, say no more--I was all over that recipe!  :-)

I'm not certain how many of these I have made for Dad, but it's been a few.  It's a wonderfully heavy, moist cake and it gets better and better with age.   Here's the recipe:

Poor Man's Cake

3 cups water

1 cup raisins

Boil for 10 minutes, remove from heat and cool

Add:

1 cup butter (I stir into the warm water and let it melt)
2 cups sugar

4 cups flour

2 tsp soda

1 tsp cloves

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp vanilla

Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes in a greased 9x13 pan.

Dad said his grandmother used to frost it with a "mocha frosting", which I was never certain how to make, so I've always used a coffee frosting.

Coffee Frosting

l box powered sugar

1/2 cup butter

1 tsp vanilla 

3-4 T cold coffee

Mix powered sugar and butter and vanilla.  Slowly add coffee until you get the desired consistency.  Will frost the top of a 9x13 cake.  

I recently looked up Poor Man's Cake on the internet and apparently it was a staple of the 1920's and '30's.  There are no eggs or milk in it, so I assume that's where the name came from.  Some of the recipes I saw called for lard instead of butter.