Filed under: Recipes — Posted by: Baden on Jan 29, 2005
Ever since I can remember, my grandmother used to make a special cake called Love cake which we used to see about once or twice a year. However, since my grandmother passed away a few years ago, this cake hasn’t been made in over 15 years.
Love cake is a rich, heavy cake which is made up mostly of ground cashews, egg yolks, spices and sugar but it also contains a fair amount of brandy in her recipe resulting in the aroma from a freshly cut Love cake being a thing of beauty.
[continue reading "Love Cake Recipe" ...]
For a couple of years now when the family would get together, we would all talk about how much we remembered Love cake and that we should try and make it again “if only we could remember the exact recipe”. My aunt Marlene had the most complete notes amongst all of us for making Love cake as she had spent many times working with her mother (my grandmother) making this recipe. A few months ago, we all decided to get together after Christmas and try and recreate the recipe from her notes. If we could accomplish this then we would properly document the process and hopefully revive the Love cake tradition for at least another generation.
I had come to learn that my grandmother’s Love cake recipe was handed to her by her mother (my great-grandmother) which made this cake a part of my family for upwards of 100 years. As you might imagine, there was more involved in trying to recreate this recipe that just having a bite of cake again.
According to my aunt, my grandmother’s original recipe involved a lot of hard manual labour with up to 3 hours of manual stirring the batter (my grandmother used no electric mixers in her recipe). Part of the process that we were going to do was to attempt to modern up the recipe with the addition of my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Armed with my mixer, electronic scale and digital camera, we got together at Marlene’s house on December 28th to try and produce a reasonable modern facsimile of the original Love cake recipe and document what we did in the process.
The attached link details the recipe that we made and we were extremely happy to eventually find out that we had made a pretty good Love cake that was by most measures, close enough to the taste and texture of my grandmother’s version.
With any luck, we’ll still have this cake recipe in the family 100 years from now.
Love Cake recipe link
Baden
Is this the original recipe….I am trying to get hold of the original and different variations on the internet puzzles me….I would like to have the ingredients for 250gms of semolina, please.
Could you please help me.
Thank you
PS-My mother was really famous for her version but unfortunately with higher studies etc I was simply not interested in taking down notes, but only relishing the finished product. But I distinctly remember her pounding the cashews little by little with a little rose water in her special mortar and pestle (table model), instead of chopping them.
Maris,
In Vancouver, I buy semolina in our grocery stores and don’t make it. It is made from wheat and is sometimes called “wheatlets” although semolina and wheatlets are technically different products.
The recipe on my web site is the best recollection of my grandmother’s recipe that we were told was in her family for a long time. Keep in mind that there is no “correct” love cake recipe as they’re as many recipes as there are cooks who make it. As such I can’t gaurantee that my recipe is what your mother made.
Please feel free to ask any other questions.
Baden