I love a good challenge. Making recipes from an older cookbook, where oven temperatures, baking times, ingredient treatments are oft unmentioned, would be fit the bill. When I spied the Burwell General Store‘s Recipe Swap, I was game. This swap involves remaking recipes from the book “All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground.” Written in a time where all cookbook owners were more familiar in the kitchen, details are spare. Adapt, create, use your best judgment, and a modern cook should succeed with older recipes. Or at least, that is the test of a good cook, right?
So first up, we had a jelly cake. Which was rather exciting for my overflowing canning pantry.The original recipe given to us included molasses and raisins, along with a fair amount of cinnamon, cloves and allspice. In my head, those flavors read winter – the scent of apple cider and bourbon, warming and rich. It’s summer, the prospect of turning on my oven seems too torturous, so it better be something I crave. That would be bright, floral flavors, fruit and honey and vanilla.
My take on the Jelly Cake of yore has dried apricots instead of raisins, honey instead of molasses, spices exchanged for vanilla extract and everything stacked in smaller bites. The recipe is half of the original amount, and baked in a muffin pan. Slicing the larger vanilla cakes into three discs and the smaller apricot cakes into two discs, toasted and layered together with fig jam, you get five delicious portions. By toasting cooled cake slices, not only do you get lovely, crunchy edges but the jam seeps into the warmed cake easier. It’s vastly easier to peel and slice the cakes once cooled. In addition, these cakes are perfect for making ahead of time. The jam mingles with the cake a bit more, the cake layers set up a bit more, everything gets better. I’m already imaging these at a picnic, prepped and refrigerated for a few hours, at a perfect sunny room temperature by the time dessert rolls around.
A few jammy notes: The fig jam is a very basic fig jam, chunky and earthy, made with fruit I brought back from San Francisco. [Yes, I am so into figs that I fly them back home, thankyouverymuch.] The texture of this jam is nice, because there are pieces of fig and spreadable jelly. When making the cakes, I used this to my advantage, for thicker and thinner spreads.
Any fruit jam of your choosing is welcome here, homemade or purchased. The vanilla cake and sunny apricots play well with cherries, berries, other stone fruits, anything of your choosing. It’s a great dessert to highlight a particularly special jam, something you might have been hoarding holding on to, looking for the perfect use.
Apricot & Fig Jam Cake
10 cakes, 5 layered desserts
- 1/3 cup milk
- 1/4 cup diced dried apricots
- 1/4 cup butter, room temperature
- 1/4 cup white sugar
- 1/4 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1 cup + 1/2 tbsp flour, divided
- 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1/2 tsp honey
- 4 oz fig jam
directions
- Preheat the oven to 350. In a small pot, combine the milk and dried apricots. Cook the mixture on the lowest heat for five minutes and remove from the stove. Drain the milk from the apricots, reserving both.
- In a medium bowl, add the butter and sugars. Cream until fluffy and smooth. Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix until combined.
- In a small bowl, place 1 cup of flour and the cream of tartar. Whisk together to aerate.
- In another small bowl, add the milk and baking soda. Whisk together until the soda has fully dissolved.
- To the butter, sugar and egg mixture, add a third of the flour mixture and whisk gently to combine. Add half of the milk mixture, whisk again to combine, and continue with another third of flour, the rest of the milk, and the final batch of flour.
- Divide the mixture in half. In a muffin pan, scoop half of the batter into the cups. (My recipe gave me 5 cakes.) In the second half of the batter, add the apricots, honey and 1/2 tablespoon of flour. Gently combine, and scoop into five additional muffin cups. Bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean.
- To assemble: Let cakes cool. Peel away the liners [if used] and slice - for the vanilla cakes, slice into three pieces. For the apricot cakes, trim off the curved tops and slice in half. Eat the trimmings, don't throw them away! Toast for five minutes, or until crispy and golden brown. With fig jam in between each layer, stack vanilla and apricot cake layers alternately.
- Eat right away, or wrap and refrigerate for 2-12 hours. Serve at room temperature.
I love that towering muffin! It looks great and scrumptious.
i love these teeny tiny jam cakes! you’re right, they look completely picnic perfect. i’ve never had fig jam before, but i’m eager to try it after seeing this recipe!
this is a great post for the recipe swap!
Thanks, Jaclyn! They’re rather tall jam cakes, but once refrigerated, they stay together nicely so that makes them picnic and travel friendly. So yummy!
These mini muffin cakes look scrumptious; toasting the cakes is genius. A fantastic recipe swap.
What a great idea to toast the cake and also using fig jam! I will have to try that method!
I am so glad you are a part of our swap! I just scrolled back through a bunch of your blog posts, and I feel like we’re food twins. That, and I’m a sucker for LOLcats as well. Anyway, your recipe looks fabulous. Your blog is great. And I love (love!) that you bring figs back from CA to NY.
the fig jam is really perfect for snack…My kids wil love it
wow, those little cakes look so figalicious! Great job with the swap, I would gladly trade you some of my blueberry cake for one of those little beauties!