ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

It’s not especially Mexican.  It’s kind of vaguely fruity.

Okay, but the cake part is pretty much completely true.

This is a recipe my grandma has had around basically forever from her version of the tale.  When she gave it to me sometime last year, she told me this was one of her favorite cake recipes, since it calls for no oil.  Since she has my same tendency to get pudgy if she isn’t being careful, I figured this was a strong candidate for a real winner.  And it…was.  Sort of.  The 1,140 calories of walnuts and 1,760 calories from sugar kind of make up for the lack of oil, you know? 

So when I got originally the recipe from her, I’d been over to help her and her boyfriend gentleman companion with some computer issues they were having.   She recently changed her recipe storage system, so while I was there she handed off some of her old recipe cards to me to keep.  I was fine with this, since I love trying new recipes, and I also like the old scraps of paper with old-fashioned handwriting on them.

Anyway, I found this site maybe a couple weeks ago called Recovered Recipes, which is basically predicated on the notion that everybody’s family has old recipes floating around somewhere that maybe don’t even get used that much anymore, and furthermore that these recipes give us a more interesting peek into history than we realize at first glance.  Anybody who knows me understands that I was totally enthusiastic about this whole concept in general, and before I even realized that the site admin was hosting a “Making History” guest event that other bloggers could participate in, I was thinking back to those recipe cards from my grandma and trying to remember where I stuck them.

Last week I couldn’t mess with the whole thing because I was too busy crapping myself over the final touches with the wedding cake, but then it turned out this week was Boss’s Day and since our HR lady thought it would be nice if someone brought treats, I volunteered to bring something because it would be an opportunity to make this cake.

I could have just picked up the phone and asked my grandma where she got it, but I was curious about the history behind the whole thing, and like doing internet research anyway, so I started Googling and stuff.  So this recipe is incredibly common, pretty much exactly as my grandma has it written.  It’s everywhere from Epicurious to Cooks.com.  The only real difference is that her version has significantly less icing.  I’m guessing that’s what makes it “light”.  So I searched for “Mexican fruit cake history” and yielded some more interesting results.  According to this blog, the recipe was published in 1993 by someone named Evelyn Horne in a column called “What’s Cooking” in “The American Eagle”.  I could not find any support for this anywhere on the internet.  And by “anywhere”, I mean “on Google”.  I couldn’t even find any evidence of the author or of this publication ever having existed.  Does anybody remember it?

I didn’t ask my grandma, but if I had to guess, I would hypothesize that regardless of when it was officially published in a newspaper or magazine, the recipe was originally invented somewhere in the American Midwest, probably in the 1950s or 60s.  It just strikes me as a good cultural fit.  The Midwest is the home of the jello salad, after all.  So why not the canned pineapple cake?  Plus, it’s such a fifties or sixties thing to slap an ostensibly ethnic name on a recipe and expect people to be impressed by it. And I really didn’t think it sounded all that Mexican.  For that, I would have expected some cinnamon or something at the very least, you know?  

I also tried searching for the recipe name and names of states.  Michigan was a big winner on this one.  The recipe surfaced in Traverse City and another less specific site earlier this year.  It also shows up attributed to a bed and breakfast in Utah.  It appears in a recent newsletter for the Kansas Orchid Society and also in some other Kansas related document that attributes the recipe to someone in Topeka, which was an interesting variation in that it calls for the cake to be made in a jelly roll pan.  Then I got tired of looking and also of doubting every rural American woman who decided it belonged to her enough that she could put her name with it somewhere. 

So from my internet research, I a) found it very interesting that the recipe came up so much in August of this year, b) managed to turn up no hint of where the thing actually came from or when it was written, and c) decided that at least my Midwest theory was pretty much vouched.  Personally I consider Michigan the north, along with Wisconsin and Minnesota, but they are culturally similar to the true geographic Midwest.  If you haven’t ever been to northern and western Michigan, I highly recommend it this time of year.  Particularly if you’re renting a car with heated seats.

Mexican Fruit Cake

• 2 cups sugar (1 lb)
• 2 cups flour (about 10 oz)
• 2-1/4 tsp soda (baking soda)
• 2 eggs
• 1 20-oz can crushed pineapple, undrained
• 1-1/4 cups black walnuts (about 6 oz)

Icing

• 2-3 oz cream cheese
• 2-1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 4 tbsp butter
• 1 tsp vanilla

Sift together the dry ingredients and place in a mixing bowl.  Add the eggs and pineapple and “beat well”.  Fold the walnuts in and pour the mixture into a 9×13 inch baking dish.  Bake at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes.  When the cake is cool, beat the cream cheese in a bowl until fluffy, add the remaining ingredients, and beat until well-combined.  Spread the icing over the top of the cake and serve from the baking dish. 

Actually, the instructions call for the walnuts to be added before beating well, but I stirred them in at the end so that they wouldn’t get all broken up in the beater.  I hypothesized at the time that this recipe was originally written with the assumption that cooks would be mixing it by hand. 

Since I wanted to keep a little bit at home, I made the recipe in two cakes pans instead of the 9×13.  By the way, do not freak when you peek at the cake and realize that it appears to be browning way too fast.  I figured out that this is simply the result of the frankly shocking quantities of sugar in the batter.  The cake turned out very messy and weird looking and I felt rather dismal until I took it to work the next morning and people began to ask for the recipe.  I think they all liked it more than I did.  Uh, not that I didn’t eat a couple of pieces over the last couple days. 

And speaking of sugar, evaluation time.  I hadn’t really looked at the recipe before the day I planned to make it and I was kind of incredulous that my grandma had represented it as a light recipe.  Not with all the sugar and walnuts!  I was so impressed by the sheer volume of sugar that I weighed it and was sickly fascinated that this recipe calls for literally a pound of sugar. And the recipe didn’t say so, but cane sugar is how we roll at this house. 

One of my new KitchenAid beaters broke and it makes me sick inside where my heart is.  I need to look up the warranty information on that shit.