Caramel Cake

Caroline's Cakes 7-Layer Caramel Cake

A Traditional Caramel Cake is a Southern time honored recipe. This cake is known for its traditional styled Caramel Icing. This cake, and cakes of this multi-layered type, all are descendants of the Dobostorte first made in Hungary and Austria. The idea of these multi-layered cakes traveled across Europe to France and England where they were sometimes referred to as Tortes. As settlers arrived in the New World, the recipe for this cake was brought with them. At times in the past, these cakes have been made in locations such as Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and many other Southern States. In New Orleans, exclusively, these multi-layered cakes are called a Doberge. Other locals have given other names to this Traditional Caramel Cake, but they extend from the same ancestry of the Dobostorte of Hungary and Austria.

History of Caramel

There are many recipes for Traditional Caramel Cakes. Most of which have been past down from generation to generation. The Caramel Cake is a known icon in the South. This Southern dessert is recognized as a historic and cultural delicacy. These cakes are made to serve for any event such as, birthdays, holidays, funerals, and other celebrations. Some say that when you eat this cake you are “preserving a slice of the past”.

The word “caramel” first appeared in print in English in 1725. The term Caramel stems from the Latin word “calamus”, meaning sugar cane. The term was then adopted from the Spanish and later used by the French. It is generally believed caramel (in the form of candy) was invented by the Arabs around 1,000 A.D., though most food historians consider the confection to be an American creation.

It is certain that 17th-century New England colonists were making travel-friendly hard candy from caramelized sugar and water. Then, in the late 1700s, New Orleans natives introduced pralines, another confection made from the same ingredients used in soft caramels; caramelized sugar and milk.

Some believe that the soft, chewy caramel that we know today was made on accident during attempts to create the hard candy mentioned above. During the mid-1800s, an American cook added cream to plain sugar caramel. She then simmered the mixture to the firm-ball stage (245 degrees). Thus comes the creation of the now-familiar creamy version of caramel. It was at this time that the word “caramel” was attached to the American candy.

By the mid-1800s, many American manufacturers were selling caramels. One such confectioner, Milton Hershey started amassing a fortune in 1886 by selling “Crystal A” caramels through his Lancaster Caramel Co. He focused on creating this new, chewy Caramel to cover and decorate his chocolates. In 1893, he attended the Chicago World’s Fair and spotted a German chocolate-making machine. He then began to build this chocolate making business into what we know today as “Hershey’s”. In 1900, Hershey got out of the caramel business.

In its heyday, from the late 1800s until the 1950s, a caramel-iced cake was popular in the sugar-rich American South. Food historians credit a Southern cook for the creation of the Caramel Cake, though they have been unable to definitively track down its exact beginning.

One of the first printed recipes for Caramel Cake appeared in 1883 in “The Dixie Cook-Book,” by Estelle Woods Wilcox. Wilcox’s recipe closely mirrors a recipe published in the 1877 “Receipt Book” written by Sallie C. Hobson.

Common Ingredients

Caramel is the basic component of caramel cake’s filling and frosting, and is simply sugar browned in a heavy pot. This icing can be made with white sugar or brown sugar and is usually enhanced with milk, butter or vanilla. Brown sugar has been around longer than white sugar. During Hobson’s day, it was a semi-refined sugar with some of the natural molasses left in. Nowadays, brown sugar is made by taking refined white sugar and mixing molasses back in.

Before white sugar’s easy availability, brown sugar was used extensively in cooking. Today, as back then, brown sugar is celebrated for its natural, mild caramel taste, and it is a main ingredient in most modern caramel cake frostings and fillings.

Cake Variations

Most recipes agree that the cake should be light yellow or white. But it is the icing and filling that gives the cake its distinctive flavor. Every one has their own idea about what the icing and filling should look and taste like.

Some believe that it should be thinly filled with caramel and covered completely in browned butter frosting. Some think the cake should be frosted completely in what people consider to be just the filling. Others believe that is should be a layered cake iced and filled with caramel giving it an extortionately sweet taste. And others believe that it should be a single cake layer with a poured caramel frosting.

References

Noi Mahoney (2000). "Cakemaker taking 'addictive' Cake to Larger Market" Capital-Gazette Newspapers

David Farrow (2004). "A Taste of The Divine." Charleston Mercury
Wendy Winters (2004). "Cake Business Adds New Layer" The Capital Newspaper
Bernadette Wheeler (2004) "Rich in Memories" Newsday
Jennifer Keats Curtis (2009). "The Icing of the Cake." Maryland Life Magazine
CYNTHIA LEJEUNE NOBLES (2011). "Southern tradition can be finicky, but not difficult to make." 2theadvocate