Thrifty Recipe: Grandma’s Wonderful Spice Cake

I love cakes, but I don’t bake as often as I’d like to. This is partly because, to my annoyance, the cakes I bake magically disappear out of their tins as soon as my back is turned. (The conjurer is my husband, a man with a crazysweet tooth.) And it is partly because thrifty cake recipes are hard to come by. They use up lots of eggs, butter and sugar, none of which are cheap at the moment.

Recently, however, my hand was forced:

I dropped a full egg carton while putting the shopping away, and two of the eggs cracked. Grrrr! Dinner was already on the go, but I needed to use up those broken eggs before they turned. Fortunately this gave me the perfect opportunity to bake Grandma’s Wonderful Spice Cake.

I’d been hanging onto this all-American recipe. It was sent in by Miss Thrifty reader Hillary, after she read my post about making your own buttermilk. Hillary is also my friend Jessica’s mom, which is how I know that this cake is a revered family favourite.

What also drew me to this recipe was that it only uses two eggs and, somehow, less butter and sugar than the various Nigella cake recipes that I have been salivating over lately. As cake recipes go, it’s fairly simple – and, like a lot of simple recipes, is utterly moreish. I knew this one wouldn’t stay in the cake tin for long…

I chickened out with the egg white icing, and added freshly squeezed lemon juice to icing sugar instead. for a topping with some bite. But I like the way that this recipe uses up all the egg: no spare gloopy egg white hanging around here.

This was the result:

Thank you Hillary!

The cake was baked and iced at around midnight, when the rest of my household was tucked up in bed, so I hung out on the sofa with a dainty dessert fork, tucking in. This cake tastes just like its name suggests it should: I want to write “warm and warming”, which looks silly on the page, but hopefully you get the idea.

Making Grandma’s Wonderful Spice Cake reminded me how much I enjoyed baking and cakes in general, so I have signed up to the local branch of an organisation called The Clandestine Cake Club. Its members meet at a secret location every month, and everyone brings a homemade cake along. Then everyone TROUGHS. That is my understanding, anyway. I haven’t been to a meeting yet, but the next one is looming and I am planning to take Grandma’s Wonderful Spice Cake along. I shall report back…