American Cake - Cake #23: Moosewood Cardamom Coffee Cake

Time Period: 1963 - 1979

American Cake is not a political book. By that, I mean that although certain types of cakes are intensely regional, and thus associated with certain types of people, the focus of each of the entries is simply the cake's origin, without much comment as to the personality of the person who invented/perfected it. And that's how it should be in a cookbook. That said, the introduction to this 1973 cake pins it to "a group of Cornell students" that "opened a mostly vegetarian restaurant called The Moosewood Collective", and served "seasonal meals with ingredients from local farms". OK, so, hippies. Got it. One of the cooks went on to publish some of those recipes in The Moosewood Cookbook, which included this coffee cake, inspired by the flavors of Scandinavian baking. That cookbook went on to be entered by the James Beard Foundation into the Cookbook Hall of Fame, which is something I now desperately need to research.

As you can tell from the picture, this cake is not fooling around when it comes to butter. The cardamom goes directly into the cake batter, which is then divided into thirds and separated by two layers of filling that contains cinnamon, brown sugar, and chopped walnuts. I baked this as this year's birthday cake, and it turned out very well. The butter saves it from being too dry, though it still benefited from a big mug of coffee on the side, or at times, some whipped cream as a topping.