Wilton Wacky Cake

Wilton Wacky Cake is a great chocolate cake recipe submitted by a listener of the WMT radio program "The Open Line." Wilton, Iowa is a small farming community not far from Davenport and well known in the area for their Wilton Candy Kitchen, the oldest ongoing ice cream parlor in the world. These folks know their sweets!

The pure simplicity makes this cake my kind of baking. No mixer, bowls, or fancy ingredients are needed, total investment of time is less than an hour.

Wilton Wacky Cake

1 1/2 cup flour
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vinegar
6 tablespoons melted shortening
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water

Sift dry ingredients into oblong baking dish. Make three wells. Put vinegar in one, vanilla in one, and shortening in the other. Cover with cold water and stir to mix with a fork. Bake at 350 for 24 minutes.

Snow on the Mountain

This cake recipe cracks me up, I cannot imagine preparing this very labor intensive recipe and my imagination runs wild with the outcome as I read the preparation. It however, must have been a favorite as it was copied twice.

Snow on the Mountain

Cake
1 cup dates
1 cup nuts, cut fine
1/2 cup flour
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 teas. baking powder
1/4 teas. salt
2 teas. vanilla

Put wax paper in cake pans. Beat eggs, add sugar & sifted dry ingredients. Stir in vanilla, dates and nuts, spread in two oiled 8" cake pans and bake 30 minutes at 350. Cool

Mountain
5 oranges
3 bananas
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1 pt. whipping cream
1/2 cup shredded coconut
maraschino Cherries

Peel oranges and cut into bite sized chunks, slice bananas and add sugar (you want enough sugar to make a little juice, but not enough to make cloyingly sweet.)

Rip the cake into bite size pieces, make a round of cake pieces about 12" in diameter in the center of your prettiest big plate, hump the pieces up a bit in the center, (because this mountain is a dome.)

Add a layer of fruit and juice, another of cake chunks, until both are used. Begin and end with cake chunks, two layers of fruit and 3 of cake. You can punch and poke ingredients all you want to in forming the mountain.

Frost the whole thing with slightly sweetened whipped cream, use plenty. Sprinkle with coconut, dot with cherries.

Leave in refrigerator several hours and serve with a spoon. Serves 16

Collecting Recipes

My Grandmother, Julia Seidar was a recipe collector who was always on the lookout for a new and exciting recipe. Funny thing though, I cannot recall my Grandmother ever owning a cook book.

She would clip from magazines and newspapers, trade and share especially good recipes with friends and quickly write down offerings from listeners of "The Open Line" program on WMT radio located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

At the time of her passing in 1983, she left 5 jam packed composition type notebooks full of recipes.

Most of these entries are from the 1950's, unfortunately time is not kind to cheap composition books and newsprint. Many pages have begun to deteriorate and are literally crumbling away. My goal is to preserve some of these old favorites, who knows one may spark a special memory!