Dolly Varden Cake
It’s been too many days since I gave you a retro recipe or since I mentioned chocolate. Life’s too short to last that long with nothing from the fifties and without chocolate. I would give you an icecream recipe, but we had a most amazing last-whiff-of-summer ice storm on Tuesday night and I am entirely over giving out icecream recipes right now. Hailstones thigh deep do that.
Today’s recipe is my grandmother’s very 1950s version. No-one round me makes Dolly Varden cakes anymore. They used to be very popular, though. The Old Foodie (about whom I’ll do a proper post one day soonish) talks about the Dolly Varden cake and its origins in the link I subtly attached to her name.
Even more subtle is that this is my first Women’s History Month post on this blog. March is Women’s History Month in the US and in Australia. I will do more substantial posts later on (and am very happy to hear your food history stories that celebrate women’s history or the history of a particular woman), but for today I though the bringing together of the unknown history preservers (my grandmother and her notebook), the writers/interpreters of history (The Old Foodie) and fictional views of women and how they extend culturally (Dolly Varden) makes a neat beginning. And it includes chocolate icing. You can’t go too far wrong if it includes chocolate.
Dolly Varden Cake
6 ozs shortening
8 ozs sugar
3 eggs
12 ozs SR flour
1 gill milk essence
2 tablespoons sultanas
1 tablespoon lemon peel
2 level teaspoons spice
Cream shortening and sugar, add eggs one by one, then flour, milk and essence. Divide mixture into three parts, putting fruit and spice in one part, leaving two parts plain. Cook in three oblong tins in a moderate oven for 20 mts. When cool join together with mock cream and ice with chocolate icing and decorate with raisins, nuts or pink icing.
March 1st, 2007 at 1:48 pm
I can’t say I have ever had Dolly Varden cake and I am having some trouble imaginging it.
Perhaps a future entry on that antipodean wonder, Pavlova?
March 1st, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Awww I thought the biscuits would have chocolate in them but it’s just the icing. I was all geared up for a chocolate indulgence. I don’t really like chocolate icing unless you’re talking melted chocolate. I read a Joanne Fluke mystery yesterday. I didn’t like the mystery much but half the book was recipes. There were some great recipes in there including some from the Regency period.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:23 pm
This blog is making me sooooo hungry. Especially as there are chocolate recipes. I may try some - no-one’s developed food poisoning from my cooking yet!
The world needs more chocolate recipes!
March 1st, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Maybe one day, Emily, but I’m one of those rare people who actually don’t like pavlovas, so it isn’t high on my priority list unless someone gives me a really good story to go with it (maybe starting “In my family…”).
Sorry, Talia, my sense of humour got in the way of my common sense. There will be chocolate one day, because chocolate is essential to my proper functioning. And yes, I prefer dark chocolate melted on cake or a really good, dark ganache. A ganache would probably work on the Dolly Varden cake, though it wouldn’t be quite authentic.
Nichola, there’s something about food blogs and hunger, isn’t there? It’s easier on the waistline to write one than to read one, for the record.
March 1st, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Cake sounds good, but I have to confess to a a bit of trepidation. We have Dolly Varden Trout up here so I wasn’t sure what I was in for. Then I noticed one of the measures was a gill . . .
Anyway, yummy blog.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:41 am
Those sound yummy! My son is looking for something like that for his cooking class at school. I will suggest them.
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:01 am
Dolly Vardens are a kind of spectacularly-colored trout in the US. Who is that woman, anyway?
imomomo
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:05 am
Yes, sorry. Didn’t check the link before I posted.
imomomo
March 6th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
This sounds delicious! Thanks for sharing the recipe!
April 5th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Excuse, and what you think concerning forthcoming elections?