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Poor Man's Spice Cake | ||||||||||||
Course : Cakes Source: Warren Farrell from Chicken Soup for the Soul Cookbook Serves: 4 |
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Ingredients:
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Preparation / Directions:1. Preheat oven to 350(F. Grease a 9x5-inch bread pan.
2. In a medium saucepan, combine raisins, butter, sugar, spices and water.
Bring mixture to a boil. Let cool.
3. Mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt and mix into
the spice mixture. Bake for 1 hour, or until just firm - spice cake is best
when moist.
Poor Man's Spice Cake
I grew up on simple and healthy food. My mom would listen to a nutritionist
named Carlton Fredericks almost every day on the radio. Those were the days
when the milkman delivered full-fat whole milk to the back door, the bread
man delivered full-of-air white bread to our front door, and sex came after
marriage. Well, both Mom and Dad agreed on the first and the third, but as
for that full-of-air white bread...Mom told the bread man that white bread
just had to go.
Our family was the only one I knew of that had heard of whole-wheat bread,
no less actually swallowed it. I knew I was doomed to sissyhood. I knew it
for sure one day when Bobby Mack, the best football player in town, said yes
when I asked, "Wanna drop by for lunch after tomorrow's game?"
I thought I was home free when Mom gave in to my pleading to get white bread
just once. But Bobby spotted the old whole-wheat bread hidden in a cupboard.
When he begged for it, said it was great for building muscle, and made me
plot to tell his mom to get it for him, well I developed a sudden fondness
for whole-wheat bread and gained an intuitive understanding of the value of
celebrity endorsements, even from guys who hurt themselves to get attention.
As great as Mom was about nutrition, when it came to cooking for crowds
(defined as anything more than a family of four), it overwhelmed her. So Dad
cooked on the holidays - the greatest homemade white and whole-wheat bread,
turkey, stuffing and what he called "Poor Man's Spice Cake." Fortunately, I
didn't know what a calorie was, much less a fat gram, so after a
50,000-calorie meal and a week's worth of fat grams, nothing deterred me
from my favorite Poor Man's Spice Cake.
When I got married, I enjoyed my wife's family's fabulous Christmases. By
Thanksgiving I could smell Christmas coming...well, almost. One smell was
missing. When my wife asked me what it was, the only thing I could remember
was something about powder and a musket. Wrong smell, she said. Dad's was
the last stop on Christmas rounds, and when I went to the oven, there it
was, the smell of Christmas, the moistness of Christmas, the taste of a cake
that knew to never let the orchestra of baking powder drown out the song of
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Nutritional Information:2504 Calories (kcal); 95g Total Fat; (33% calories from fat); 27g Protein; 393g Carbohydrate; 248mg Cholesterol; 2898mg Sodium | ||||||||||||