One of my all time favorite cakes is Grandma's Applesauce Cake. It really does have to be Grandma's recipe, or it's just not the same at all. It also helps to have homemade applesauce and black walnuts fresh cracked from the shells which is what Grnndma always had at the family farm in Raven's Nest Branch, Virginia.
The black walnuts at the family farm were not easy to crack or shell. I used an anvil out in the garage and a hammer to crack tons of walnuts when I lived in the mountains after college. Once the roaster pan was full of cracked black walnuts, Grandmaw would just leave it on the kitchen nook table. Everyone would shell some nuts as they hung out in the kitchen. The incentive was that Grandmaw would make awesome food like her applesauce cake if she had nuts ready to use.
My aunts on my Dad's side who never married shelled a lot of black walnuts each year to sell. Their black walnuts were not so hard, and they cracked easier and would come out in bigger pieces that those in Poppaw and Grandmaw's holler. I couldn't tell a real difference in taste other than fresh black walnuts taste a lot better than the little bags in the grocery store.
I should also mention that black walnuts have big green outer shells that dry over time. You need to get the shell or husk off before cracking the nuts. You can do this by walking on the nuts, but the green jackets make an awful green mess of your tennis shoes. Your hands also smell like black walnuts and turn green if you work with the freshly fallen nuts.
Maybe it's all the work that goes into black walnuts or the applesauce from the translucent apples on the tree in the back yard orchid. The apples are tiny, and it takes a ton of them to make batch of anything.
Who knows?
It's just a darn good cake, and my mom (Evelyn Myer Allison Looney) gave me a copy of the recipe. That, along with things I remember, are included here so that the recipe passes down to family, friends, and even strangers who love the extra special recipes from days gone.
Grandmaw's Applesauce Cake
Cream together well in a large cake mixing bowl:
1 cup shortening or softened butter
2 cups sugar
2 eggs (room temp)
In a medium sized bowl, mix together (Grandmaw sifted):
4 cups plain flour
2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon powered cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoon cinnamon
Stir into the flour mixture the following (so that the little bits of flour keep the fruit and nuts from sinking to the bottom of the cake). Just lightly toss so that there's some flour on the nuts/raisins:
2 cups raisins (sometimes Grandmaw used the yellow raisins - I think she did that for color contrast, although yellow raisins seem a bit sweeter)
2 cups of black walnuts (broken up pieces)
Put the floured nuts and raisins in a separate bowl so that it is easier to mix the base of the cake and so that the fruit and nuts do not get broken up.
tip: Pour very warm water over the raisins before mixing them in the flour mixture so that they rehydrte a bit and have more flavor and are softer in the cake. You can simmer raisins also. If you add the water, do drain off any excess before mixing in the flour or mixing up the cake.
Measure out:
2 cups applesauce
Use the large mixing bowl with the creamed butter/sugar as the base. Rotate the flour mixture and the applesauce. Pour in about 1/4 of dry flour mix and 1/4 of applesauce and mix. Mix. Repeat three more times or until all the flour and applesauce are in and mixed up.
Grease a tube or pound cake pan and sprinkle on just a little flour. This is to keep the cake from sticking. Grandmaw lined her pan with waxed paper to prevent sticking. Some members of the family thought it was to keep is fresh, but Grandmaw said that wasn't really the case. Food never lasted long enough at her house to taste "old."
Bake the cake at 300 or 325 for about an hour. This is where you likely want to play around and write down what works the best with the stove you cook on. Use a toothpick in the center of the cake to test for done-ness until you get your time ad temps perfect.
Grandmaw's recipe called for a flat pan lid to go over the top of the cake to prevent cracking. She had an old very flat lid that looked like it perhaps came with the old cake pan. I never used a lid over the crack. I don't see cracks in a homemade cake as detracting.
This is a fabulous cake. I especially loved to get a piece straight out of the oven which happened perhaps maybe three times in my life. It's a memory forever - that's for sure.
If anyone in the family makes Grandma's applesauce cake, shoot a photo, and I will add that. It is a really beautiful cake. I'm checking about getting some fresh black walnuts, so hopefully I can make the cake for the holidays.
Note: We did not have a pound cake pan at Thanksgiving, so we used three round 9 inch cake pans. It took about 40 minutes to cook the smaller/thinner cakes.
