The past had a way of dressing up the plain into something secretly decadent. So when I came across this old recipe, called How To Kill Your Wife Cake, I knew I had found something that was a little quirky but was also delicious.
Online is a great way to find other people’s recipe tin favorites, and this cake caught a lot of users’ eyes simply with the crazy name How To Kill Your Wife Cake. Someone online had named it How To Kill Your Wife Cake after the famous 1960s romantic-comedy when a wife keeps overfeeding her husband, and he wishes to be a bachelor again. Essentially this cake will fatten people up without them even knowing.
Using fruits and vegetables as the star ingredient became a trend in the 70s. Fruits and vegetables were a front for something sweet and sinful. Take the classic carrot cake recipe, sure, carrot cake has carrots, but also hiding within carrot cake is a great amount of delicious sugar, which isn’t a bad thing. This recipe uses the dessert “but with a healthy ingredient” strategy, and it works out.
This cake isn’t the online user’s creation, but it comes from a cookbook that’s forgotten to time. In the early 1980s, a popular gourmet food store called the Silver Palate published a cookbook in its namesake, revealing some of their most popular recipes, one of which was this Chunky Apple Walnut Cake. You may think of this as a neutral health cake, but this dessert is deceptive. A healthy dose of calvados (apple brandy) moistens the richly spiced cake, and an apple cider glaze soaks the cake after you pull it out of the oven. In the photo, you see that the cake was made in a bundt pan, but it should ideally be made in a springform pan. The cake is so moist, it’s prone to sticking in a bundt pan and may not come out of the pan cleanly.
The recipe is above, if you bake it up, tell us how it turned out!