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Vintage Cakes: Timeless Recipes for Cupcakes, Flips, Rolls, Layer, Angel, Bundt, Chiffon, and Icebox Cakes for Today's Sweet Tooth [A Baking Book}
A charming collection of updated recipes for both classic and forgotten cakes, from a timeless yellow birthday cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, to the new holiday standard, Gingerbread Icebox Cake with Mascarpone Mousse, written by a master baker and coauthor of Rustic Fruit Desserts.
Make every occasion—the annual bake sale, a birthday party, or even a simple Sunday supper—a celebration with this charming collection of more than 50 remastered classics.
Each recipe in Vintage Cakes is a confectionary stroll down memory lane. After sifting through her treasure trove of cookbooks and recipe cards, master baker and author Julie Richardson selected the most inventive, surprising, and just plain delicious cakes she could find. The result is a delightful and delectable time capsule of American baking, with recipes spanning a century.
Each cake has been expertly tested and retooled using the best ingredients and most up-to-date techniques. With precise and careful guidance, Richardson guides home bakers—whether total beginners or seasoned cooks—toward picture-perfect meringues, extra-creamy frostings, and lighter-than-air chiffons.
A few of the dreamy cakes that a chocolatey Texas Sheet Cake as large and abundant as its namesake state, the boozy Not for Children Gingerbread Bundt cake, and the sublime Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake with Chocolate Whipped Cream. With recipes to make Betty Crocker proud, these nostalgic and foolproof sweets rekindle our love affair with cakes.
Make every occasion—the annual bake sale, a birthday party, or even a simple Sunday supper—a celebration with this charming collection of more than 50 remastered classics.
Each recipe in Vintage Cakes is a confectionary stroll down memory lane. After sifting through her treasure trove of cookbooks and recipe cards, master baker and author Julie Richardson selected the most inventive, surprising, and just plain delicious cakes she could find. The result is a delightful and delectable time capsule of American baking, with recipes spanning a century.
Each cake has been expertly tested and retooled using the best ingredients and most up-to-date techniques. With precise and careful guidance, Richardson guides home bakers—whether total beginners or seasoned cooks—toward picture-perfect meringues, extra-creamy frostings, and lighter-than-air chiffons.
A few of the dreamy cakes that a chocolatey Texas Sheet Cake as large and abundant as its namesake state, the boozy Not for Children Gingerbread Bundt cake, and the sublime Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake with Chocolate Whipped Cream. With recipes to make Betty Crocker proud, these nostalgic and foolproof sweets rekindle our love affair with cakes.
178 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews
August 18, 2012
This book is heaven! Oh, you haven't read it yet? You bet your sweet batter you butter get crackalackin! These cakes are delicious and you NEED this book in your cookin library. Highly recommended!
July 7, 2012
Yum,yum,yum....I want the Pink Cake on Page 121 and I want it now! Chocolate cake with a raspberry butter cream icing...looks and sounds divine. In fact every cake in this delightful new cookbook is divine.
The cookbook is divided into several sections:
Hasty Cakes
Everyday Cakes
Little Cakes and Light Cakes
Flips and Rolls
Layer Cakes
Fillings, Frostings and Icings
The book starts off basic tips and techniques for cakes which will be helpful for every baker, new or old. The first recipe in the book, Berry Long Cake with Ginger Crumb sounds amazing as well as easy to make. This would be amazing for breakfast (for those of us who are known to eat pie or cake for breakfast!) How about some Wacky Cake! Or the Harvey Wallbanger! I know my better half would adore this Maple Pecan Chiffon Cake with Brown Butter Icing.
In these busy days when few people take the time to bake, it is wonderful to discover this ode to baking days of old...when time was slower and people took the time to sit back and appreciate a wonderful piece of a homemade cake! If you collect cookbooks like I do, are a baker, or just love drooling over beautiful photos of cakes then this book is a must for you!
The cookbook is divided into several sections:
Hasty Cakes
Everyday Cakes
Little Cakes and Light Cakes
Flips and Rolls
Layer Cakes
Fillings, Frostings and Icings
The book starts off basic tips and techniques for cakes which will be helpful for every baker, new or old. The first recipe in the book, Berry Long Cake with Ginger Crumb sounds amazing as well as easy to make. This would be amazing for breakfast (for those of us who are known to eat pie or cake for breakfast!) How about some Wacky Cake! Or the Harvey Wallbanger! I know my better half would adore this Maple Pecan Chiffon Cake with Brown Butter Icing.
In these busy days when few people take the time to bake, it is wonderful to discover this ode to baking days of old...when time was slower and people took the time to sit back and appreciate a wonderful piece of a homemade cake! If you collect cookbooks like I do, are a baker, or just love drooling over beautiful photos of cakes then this book is a must for you!
May 28, 2015
This is one of the most amazing cake cookbooks in my arsenal. I got it because I wanted to make more old fashioned cakes and these recipes are to die for. They not only are easy to follow, which is a must for any baker and great for the beginner. They also give you detail about what the finished cake is like. Is it moist. Does it have a good shelf-life. Etc. There is also plenty of history to tempt those of us who love nostalgia. Also, these recipes are easy to adapt for the Gluten Free baker. That is a MUST in my family. I made my mom the Old Vermont Burnt Sugar Cake With Maple Cream Cheese Frosting (my GF version of course) and I am still getting hugs and kisses. If you only ever buy one cake cookbook, THIS IS THE ONE!!!!!! I also bought her Rustic Fruit Desserts cookbook and cannot wait for the wondrous creations that will come out of it.
October 29, 2012
Vintage Cakes is the kind of book that should be really appealing to me. Julie Richardson, who owns Baker & Spice Bakery in Portland, Oregon, inherited the contents of an old filing cabinet from the previous bakery that was in the space Baker & Spice now inhabits. As she writes in the introduction to this book, that filing cabinet turned out to be
Richardson used the contents of that filing cabinet, plus vintage cookbooks and other old recipes, to come up with the recipes in this book, which are updated for modern kitchens/tastes.
My problem, I guess, is that the recipes are a little too updated. Basically all of them assume you have a stand mixer, which I don't have, and it's hard for me to get a sense of which ones would be fine to attempt by hand vs. which ones wouldn't. (I don't even have an electric hand mixer, though I do have an immersion blender with a whisk attachment that I can use for whipping cream or egg whites.) "The Cake Baker's Battery," at the start of the book, also recommends having "an electronic baking scale" and "lots of mixing bowls, in all sizes" (um - I have two - a big one and a not so big one)—all of which kind of made me feel like this book is for people with suburban kitchens, not me.
The "Hasty Cakes" section starts promisingly, though: Richardson says many of these "don't even need a mixer or more than one bowl." But then there are the ingredients: Berry Long Cake with Ginger Crumb is out of the question in New York in November: berries aren't in season here right now. Rhubarb Pudding Cake won't do for the same reason. Shoo-Fly Cake is a molasses-and-spice cake that sounds great, but calls for a cup of coffee...and I only drink tea at home. (I guess I could buy a bottle of Stumptown cold-brew and heat it, since the recipe says the coffee can be reheated/not fresh.) Mississippi Mud Cupcakes with Marshmallow Frosting have the same issue. Other cakes in other sections of the book call for pans I don't have, like a tube pan, or a Bundt pan, or an "angel food cake pan with feet," whatever that might be. But others would only require a trip to the grocery store for things like buttermilk or sliced almonds or canola oil. Sometimes recipes helpfully offer substitutions for different seasons, but I would have liked it if they'd been more precise: there's a chocolate apricot upside-down cake, for example, with cocoa and fresh cardamom: it sounds delicious. It uses fresh apricots, but the notes suggest substituting pitted sour cherries or fresh cranberries if apricots aren't in season. Well, it's getting to be cranberry season - but how many cranberries? The recipe doesn't say. I guess as many cranberries as would equate, in volume, to 6 medium apricots sliced into quarters: but it's a little intimidating to be trying to estimate that on my own.
The book itself is visually appealing, with great color photography and food styling—my local library only has this as an ebook, so I read it on my computer, and I suspect the pictures probably look even better on paper. And the recipes that didn't call for pans I didn't have or out-of-season fruits sounded good, sometimes really good. There's a layer cake that involves burnt-sugar syrup, maple syrup in the cake, and maple cream cheese frosting—mmm. By the time I finished the book, I'd noted down 21 different cakes (out of just over 50 cake recipes) that I might want to make, ranging from ones that sound pretty easy (Wacky Cake, Lazy Daisy Oatmeal Cake, Blueberry Cornmeal Skillet Cake, Ozark Pudding Cake) to kind of complicated (Double Dip Caramel Cake, Blackout Cake, that aforementioned maple cream cheese concoction). But I didn't actually bake any of them, which is more a problem of timing on my part rather than a failure of the book to inspire. (Among other things: I finished this book right before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Standing in the 10-items-or-fewer line at the grocery store on Saturday was bad enough; buying cake ingredients would have pushed me into the non-express lines, and, well, no.) I might check this book out again in the future, and maybe next time I'll even bake something from it.
"a gold mine of baking formulas, journals, and magazines dating back to the 1920s. These were gems from a time when a cup cake was a "cup cake," a cookie was a "cooky," and the word "goober" was synonymous with peanut."
Richardson used the contents of that filing cabinet, plus vintage cookbooks and other old recipes, to come up with the recipes in this book, which are updated for modern kitchens/tastes.
My problem, I guess, is that the recipes are a little too updated. Basically all of them assume you have a stand mixer, which I don't have, and it's hard for me to get a sense of which ones would be fine to attempt by hand vs. which ones wouldn't. (I don't even have an electric hand mixer, though I do have an immersion blender with a whisk attachment that I can use for whipping cream or egg whites.) "The Cake Baker's Battery," at the start of the book, also recommends having "an electronic baking scale" and "lots of mixing bowls, in all sizes" (um - I have two - a big one and a not so big one)—all of which kind of made me feel like this book is for people with suburban kitchens, not me.
The "Hasty Cakes" section starts promisingly, though: Richardson says many of these "don't even need a mixer or more than one bowl." But then there are the ingredients: Berry Long Cake with Ginger Crumb is out of the question in New York in November: berries aren't in season here right now. Rhubarb Pudding Cake won't do for the same reason. Shoo-Fly Cake is a molasses-and-spice cake that sounds great, but calls for a cup of coffee...and I only drink tea at home. (I guess I could buy a bottle of Stumptown cold-brew and heat it, since the recipe says the coffee can be reheated/not fresh.) Mississippi Mud Cupcakes with Marshmallow Frosting have the same issue. Other cakes in other sections of the book call for pans I don't have, like a tube pan, or a Bundt pan, or an "angel food cake pan with feet," whatever that might be. But others would only require a trip to the grocery store for things like buttermilk or sliced almonds or canola oil. Sometimes recipes helpfully offer substitutions for different seasons, but I would have liked it if they'd been more precise: there's a chocolate apricot upside-down cake, for example, with cocoa and fresh cardamom: it sounds delicious. It uses fresh apricots, but the notes suggest substituting pitted sour cherries or fresh cranberries if apricots aren't in season. Well, it's getting to be cranberry season - but how many cranberries? The recipe doesn't say. I guess as many cranberries as would equate, in volume, to 6 medium apricots sliced into quarters: but it's a little intimidating to be trying to estimate that on my own.
The book itself is visually appealing, with great color photography and food styling—my local library only has this as an ebook, so I read it on my computer, and I suspect the pictures probably look even better on paper. And the recipes that didn't call for pans I didn't have or out-of-season fruits sounded good, sometimes really good. There's a layer cake that involves burnt-sugar syrup, maple syrup in the cake, and maple cream cheese frosting—mmm. By the time I finished the book, I'd noted down 21 different cakes (out of just over 50 cake recipes) that I might want to make, ranging from ones that sound pretty easy (Wacky Cake, Lazy Daisy Oatmeal Cake, Blueberry Cornmeal Skillet Cake, Ozark Pudding Cake) to kind of complicated (Double Dip Caramel Cake, Blackout Cake, that aforementioned maple cream cheese concoction). But I didn't actually bake any of them, which is more a problem of timing on my part rather than a failure of the book to inspire. (Among other things: I finished this book right before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Standing in the 10-items-or-fewer line at the grocery store on Saturday was bad enough; buying cake ingredients would have pushed me into the non-express lines, and, well, no.) I might check this book out again in the future, and maybe next time I'll even bake something from it.
October 4, 2012
I didn't read this cover to cover, as it is a cookbook, but I read various sections and perused recipes and pictures, and it's a very charming book. There are a few recipes I am definitely going to try, and some that I am dubious about, which is usual for me, as I'm not the most adventurous when it comes to new foods. I was surprised to learn that cakes were sweeter in the early 1900s. I would've thought, with America's raging sweet tooth (and I'm included there), that desserts would be sweeter today! It was also interesting that with the advent of cake mixes, some recipes that were quite popular were lost. The author reconstructs a popular recipe based on the flavor of the cake mix that supplanted it, which I thought was very cool. I love baking, and this would be a cookbook I could see myself owning. (Oh, and I also like that it's a local author - yay, local authors and bakeries!)
May 8, 2020
Fabulous from beginning to end. Easy to use, for a basic or experienced baker, with a few great tips for either. The recipes are flavorful and well balanced without being too sweet. I highly recommend this book.
Extra note: the Kentucky Bourbon Cake is easy and incredible. 😄 .... You can start there if you wish. I certainly did. 😉
Extra note: the Kentucky Bourbon Cake is easy and incredible. 😄 .... You can start there if you wish. I certainly did. 😉
February 16, 2014
While interesting (I particularly loved the names- like the Watergate cake), I was disappointed by sparse amount of pictures. I've never seen or heard of most of the cakes, so I think visuals would have been nice. Also, I would have liked longer blurbs about the history of the cakes and their names.
September 30, 2012
The cakes in this book are so pretty and reminiscent of times in the past. I didn't really like the chocolate ganache recipe (chocolate chips and cream, which ended up tasting too much like the chips and not the rich chocolatey taste we were hoping for), but some of the recipes were really fun.
November 12, 2012
Finding this book at my local library was a treat as I will soon be adding it to my own. Lovely gloss photos of delicious cakes, flips and rolls with real ingredients. Can't wait to try out these recipes. Something for everyone's taste. Must read!
January 22, 2013
I am not a fan of cookbooks that don't have at least one picture for each recipe. A lot of these recipes sounded very tasty, but I am just not that motivated to make them when I can't see what they'll look like. This book did have some good baking tips though.
August 13, 2018
This book says that it is about vintage cakes, but the recipes are heavily edited to a very specific early 2000s tastes, making it feel less than authentic. The blurbs were all things I had read in other books. Nothing particularly original. I can't say I learned anything.
March 22, 2019
Beautiful book with great recipes. Just be ready to dramatically increase your budget for butter and eggs and cocoa.
July 20, 2020
When I was in high school my mom and I visited my Aunt Debbie in Indiana one summer. It was a brief trip, just a stop-through en route to our final destination. While we were there my aunt pulled out a yellow-papered gem--my grandmother's cookbook circa the 1960s! I never met my maternal grandmother as she passed well before I was born, but looking at that cookbook was akin to peering into a time capsule. It was a patchwork book of recipes, newspaper clippings, and scribbled hand-written notes in the margins.
Ever since then I have been simply enchanted with vintage recipes and culinary relics from by-gone eras. So naturally when I discovered a book of vintage cake recipes while cruising amazon one day I knew I needed to add it to my collection! I spent a few weeks contemplating it before finally purchasing. The book itself is undoubtedly beautiful: glossy pages, perfectly frosted cakes, and neatly manicured fonts. For that alone, I do enjoy it, but to be honest the book feels a bit inaccessible to a novice baker. It presumes that you have a coveted enameled stand mixer in which to effortlessly blend and beat all your ingredients. I am a humble cook and neither have the room nor wherewithall to possess a Kitchen-Aid behemoth.
That being said...the recipes are very well crafted and turned out perfectly at each pass, but I did find myself having to modify a bit. Also the recipes weren't kept whole in their true vintage form and were largely modernized and updated. That's nice and all, but I feel the book would be more accurately titled "Vintage Cakes with a Modern Twist!" All in all it's a pretty cookbook with good recipes, but not a stand-out in my book. It didn't reach my expectations, but it wasn't bad either. A solid 3 stars!
Ever since then I have been simply enchanted with vintage recipes and culinary relics from by-gone eras. So naturally when I discovered a book of vintage cake recipes while cruising amazon one day I knew I needed to add it to my collection! I spent a few weeks contemplating it before finally purchasing. The book itself is undoubtedly beautiful: glossy pages, perfectly frosted cakes, and neatly manicured fonts. For that alone, I do enjoy it, but to be honest the book feels a bit inaccessible to a novice baker. It presumes that you have a coveted enameled stand mixer in which to effortlessly blend and beat all your ingredients. I am a humble cook and neither have the room nor wherewithall to possess a Kitchen-Aid behemoth.
That being said...the recipes are very well crafted and turned out perfectly at each pass, but I did find myself having to modify a bit. Also the recipes weren't kept whole in their true vintage form and were largely modernized and updated. That's nice and all, but I feel the book would be more accurately titled "Vintage Cakes with a Modern Twist!" All in all it's a pretty cookbook with good recipes, but not a stand-out in my book. It didn't reach my expectations, but it wasn't bad either. A solid 3 stars!
December 13, 2022
I was disappointed with how few pictures there are in this recipe book. Since the cakes are vintage there are some I'd never heard of and it would be nice to know what they look like, but it's also nice in general to have photos in recipe books.
The recipes themselves are interesting. They're divided by type and there's a short blurb about each. Some of the ingredients aren't super common today and others include common allergies like nuts so depending on your needs there may only be a few cakes you can make. The recipe is also written in a dense paragraph instead of step by step which makes it harder to keep track if you're referencing the recipe while you're baking.
The idea is neat, it just wasn't what I expected.
The recipes themselves are interesting. They're divided by type and there's a short blurb about each. Some of the ingredients aren't super common today and others include common allergies like nuts so depending on your needs there may only be a few cakes you can make. The recipe is also written in a dense paragraph instead of step by step which makes it harder to keep track if you're referencing the recipe while you're baking.
The idea is neat, it just wasn't what I expected.
December 4, 2022
From the title, I was expecting this to be
* overly sweet US-style cakes slathered in buckets of frosting
* inedible recipes from days of yore that are only good for the entertainment value of reading about them,
but there are some actually fun sounding recipes in here that made me really want to try them out, so absolute kudos to the author.
Don't be scared off by the "Vintage" in the title!
* overly sweet US-style cakes slathered in buckets of frosting
* inedible recipes from days of yore that are only good for the entertainment value of reading about them,
but there are some actually fun sounding recipes in here that made me really want to try them out, so absolute kudos to the author.
Don't be scared off by the "Vintage" in the title!
June 11, 2024
Rhubarb Pudding Cake
Shoo-Fly Cake
Grammy Cake
Wacky Cake
Texas Sheet Cake
Mississippi Mud Cupcakes w/Marshmallow Frosting
Malted Milk Chocolate Cupcakes
Angel Cake w/Chocolate & Orange Freckles
German Chocolate Roll
Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake w/Chocolate Whipped Cream
Red Velvet Cake w/Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting
Goober Cake
Black & White Cake
Double Dip Caramel Cake
Blackout Cake
Gingerbread Icebox Cake w/Mascarpone Mousse
Various ganaches and frostings
Shoo-Fly Cake
Grammy Cake
Wacky Cake
Texas Sheet Cake
Mississippi Mud Cupcakes w/Marshmallow Frosting
Malted Milk Chocolate Cupcakes
Angel Cake w/Chocolate & Orange Freckles
German Chocolate Roll
Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake w/Chocolate Whipped Cream
Red Velvet Cake w/Mascarpone Cream Cheese Frosting
Goober Cake
Black & White Cake
Double Dip Caramel Cake
Blackout Cake
Gingerbread Icebox Cake w/Mascarpone Mousse
Various ganaches and frostings
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2017
Oh my. This book. I will have to procure for our own private cookbook selection. I cannot wait to bake my way through it. The recipes are easy to read and even easier to understand and baking anything out of this will make me look really good at summer BBQs and potlucks. The photos are beautiful and make me want to jump out of my comfortable reading chair and get to the grocery store.
September 10, 2018
This book has a lot of basic and delicious vintage recipes, and looking at how to make it makes you feel really hungry! I think a way to improve this book is to add more pictures to show people what it looks like because then it's a lot of trouble to search it up on the internet to see what it looks like. I think this is a great cake book with amazing recipes
January 22, 2019
Over the weekend, I made both the Honey-Bee Cake and the Lemon & Almond Streamliner. Both were absolutely amazing!! The honey cake tasted even better the day after once the honey really set in the cake. Although the lemon custard for the almond cake took a bit longer than the book said to set, the cake was still amazing and was gone within one night.
June 9, 2019
I’ve had this book for a couple of years but had been kind of intimidated by it. When my Food52 Baking club chose it, I finally dove in and am glad I did. The coffee walnut cake was incredible, and the whiskey bourbon was whiskey-ish in the best way possible. The lemon streamliner cane was also fantastic.
July 8, 2019
Vintage Cakes is a charming book that brings back long forgotten memories and cakes. I so enjoyed the bit of history that prefaces every recipe.
There are loads of finished product pictures to make your mouth water and while I prefer recipes all on one page that does not detract from this lovely book of cake history.
There are loads of finished product pictures to make your mouth water and while I prefer recipes all on one page that does not detract from this lovely book of cake history.
December 25, 2020
I have made 3 cakes from this book and I don’t consider myself an expert baker, but they make me feel fancy and accomplished, yet the recipes are really easy to follow! I wish there were pictures for each cake though.
I loved the book so much I requested it as a gift, and got it. I plan to make many more cakes!
I loved the book so much I requested it as a gift, and got it. I plan to make many more cakes!
March 24, 2022
I do love this book although not every recipe is exceptional. But it's a fun book to bake through and try all the different recipes, sure, some of which are great and some questionable. But they are vintage - so you have to go with the trend of the times. Well laid out and explained, with history, and no mistakes noted. And some absolutely exceptional recipes.
January 31, 2018
I haven't actually baked one of the recipes yet, but I was really caught up in the cookbook as if it were a book. She uses whole ingredients, which I like, and every cake has a story. I do wish there were mor photos!
August 29, 2021
such a lovely collection of delicious cakes & more. the standout recipe for me is the raspberry buttercream paired with the devils food cake (aka the pink cake). relatively easy recipes for early intermediate stage bakers.
December 8, 2021
I was pleasantly surprised by this cookbook. I expected kind of a antique collection of cakes that have been since improved upon. Instead, the cakes are vibrant and current but time tested and popular. A great baking resource.
December 11, 2017
Packed with interesting old time recipes. Great
Collection.
Collection.
December 16, 2019
This book had a few really amazing recipes. I just wished there were more pictures.
Read
August 16, 2020Good like
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 14, 2021
LOVED THIS! So many delicious recipes I can’t wait to try!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews