Bakers have been making spooky Halloween Cakes for at least a hundred years. The October, 1924 issue of American Cookery magazine had a recipe for Witches’ Cake. The recipe intrigued me. It called for making a chocolate layer cake, and decorating it by putting the two parts of the cake together with a red frosting, then icing it with chocolate frosting, and decorating with small red candies that are arranged to make an outline of a witch.

This was a fun recipe to make. The cake was a rich and fudgy cake with an almost brownie-like texture.

Here’s the original recipe:

The old recipe called for tinting some of the frosting red with cochineal. I wasn’t familiar with cochineal so I did an online search. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, cochineal is a crimson dye made from an insect.

An average trip to the grocery store can yield a cartful of colorful foods. Bright among the rainbow are the reds, lending hues to products such as raspberry jam, canned cherries, strawberry licorice and red velvet cake. Often, their source is a certain small insect.

Cochineal bugs — oval-shaped scale insects around 0.2 inches long — are harvested and turned into the natural dyes cochineal extract, carmine and the pure pigment carminic acid. They have been used to color food, textiles and cosmetics for centuries.

Smithsonian Magazine (March 29, 2022)

I had no idea where I could buy cochineal, so I used dark red food coloring to tint the icing for the filling.

I didn’t find any small red wintergreen candies at the store where I shop, so I bought small red “sugar pearls” in the cake and cookie decorating section.

Squares of unsweetened baking chocolate have gotten smaller over the last hundred years. Back then a square was an ounce in size; today a square of a popular baking chocolate is 1/2 ounce.

This recipe doesn’t call for any baking powder or baking soda. The beaten egg whites provided the leavening.

I used 2/3 cup of milk, and I substituted all-purpose flour for the pastry flour.

I found recipes for Plain Frosting and Chocolate Frosting in a hundred-year-old cookbook:

I quadrupled the Plain Frosting recipe so that I’d have enough frosting to ice the cake. I did not use any water when making the Chocolate Frosting. I just used milk to get it to the right consistency. I used less chocolate than called for in the old recipe, since a square of chocolate was 1-ounce a hundred-years ago and the squares are smaller today- but it still was very chocolatey.

Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:

Marble Cake has always been one of my favorite types of cake, so when I saw a hundred-year-old recipe for Variety Marble Cake, I decided to give it a try. The old recipe had lots of options, including options for Marble Cocoa Cake and Marble Spice Cake. I went with the Marble Cocoa Cake option.

The cake was easy to make and tasty. This recipe makes a small 8″ X 8″ cake, which is perfect for a small family.

Here’s the original recipe:

When I made this recipe, I needed to add about 2 tablespoons of melted butter to the eggs to get 1/2 cup. I used vanilla for the flavoring.

The recipe says to alternate putting spoonfuls of light and dark batter into the pan. I followed this direction – though if I made the cake again, I’d also lightly swirl the batters using a knife to get a more even marbleing.

The recipe says to bake the cake for 45 minutes. When I made this cake, it took significantly less time (more like 35 minutes).

Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:

I got a request for a “healthy cake” that was low fat and low sodium, so looked through my hundred-year-old cookbooks and magazines for something that might work.  I found a recipe for Orange Loaf Cake that I think fits the bill.

The recipe only calls for 1/3 cup of butter, and just 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda and no salt. So this loaf cake is both low fat and low sodium.  The cake was very easy to make, had a nice texture, and a delightful sunny, orange flavor.

Here’s the original recipe:

Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:

This week I decided to make a hundred-year-old recipe for Lemon Citron Cake. I can already sense your questions. Why make this cake in February? Isn’t citron a holiday fruitcake ingredient that is usually only available in stores in December?

Well . . . let me explain.

Do you ever have ingredients left over after completing holiday baking, and don’t know how you’ll ever use them? Well, that’s how I felt about some citron that was still lingering in one of my kitchen cabinets. I thought that I might have to throw it out; but, then I happened across a recipe for Lemon Citron Cake in a hundred-year-old cookbook and decided to give it a try.

The cake was delightful. It had a lovely, light texture and a sunny citrus flavor. The original recipe didn’t indicate whether the cake should be iced. I decided to put a light lemon glaze on it, which worked well with the citron. Citron is too tasty to be relegated to just the winter holidays. Assuming you can find the citron, this cake would be lovely during any season.

Here’s the original recipe:

It seemed unusual that this recipe called for two egg yolks and three egg whites, so I decided that maybe there was a typo and used three egg yolks. It worked fine. I’m also not sure why the recipe called for creaming some of the sugar with the Crisco shortening and the remainder with the egg yolks, and then combining. I just put them all in the mixing bowl.

Any shortening will work for this recipe so I didn’t specify a brand. Additionally, I gently stirred the citron into the cake batter after all the other ingredients had been combined rather then adding pieces of citron “here and there” as the batter was being poured into the pan.

Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks: