Caramel Cake

My family goes way back with caramel cake, but Mama nor Daddy ever mastered the art of making one.  Mama and I nonetheless would buy perfect caramel cakes from the Montgomery Farmers Market made by some local person whose name now fails me.  The cake was yellow and soft; the caramel slightly grainy in a fudgey way.  The combination superb, especially with a cup of coffee.  Over the years I have made facsimiles of that caramel cake, but I never hit the mark.  Sometimes the humidity would be too high, and the caramel just didn't work exactly right.  But I finally did it.  The photo above shows the last slice of a caramel cake I made over the weekend to take for coffee hour at church.  At long last, it matched the caramel cake of my youth, and I credit hand whipping the icing.  That and this old fashioned recipe that did not allow for whipping the flour, which can make a cake hard or tough (as we say down South).  I was amazed at how everyone had a special place in his or her heart for caramel cake, and they ate it with wild abandon, even the diabetic and the guy who didn't stay for coffee hour but stuck out his palms to take a piece as if it were the Eucharist.  

We also have a saying when food is beyond good - it's good enough to make you slap your Mama.  But I didn't.  I took her some cake, and when she gave it a full endorsement I knew I had arrived.  Could anything make a girl prouder than her Mama telling her she sure knows how to make a cake?

A good cake is a tradition - the taste of family, home and memory.   These things are important down South where good recipes and good people are not forgotten. 

Comments

[JAN G]

PLEASE SHARE THE RECIPE.