Reddit Can't Get Enough Of This 6-Ingredient Whipping Cream Cake
The subreddit of Old Recipes hosts what the name states: old recipes that emerge from the back of long shelved cookbooks. Occasionally, a gem resonates on a wider level. Recently, it was a baked confection known as whipping cream cake.
Explaining the origins of the cake, jamie_of_house_m wrote that they received the recipe from their husband's Iowan grandmother and that it since has become her birthday cake of choice. "It's dense and moist and the bottom never seems to completely set which makes for a nice slightly gooey layer," they wrote of the dessert's allure.
The recipe itself is almost a straightforward cake recipe. You need butter, eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, and — guess what — whipping cream. Surprise! You let the butter soften, then add sugar, mixing them thoroughly. Add the eggs individually with a good mixing in between. Then introduce the flour, unwhipped whipping cream (this is important!), and vanilla. Bung the cake into the oven before it's preheated, and then set the oven to heat to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake for an hour and 15 minutes. Besides the cold oven trick, there should be nothing out of the ordinary in this recipe.
Even confined within the post, the response was huge. Ever since, people have been uploading their own attempts at whipping cream cake. And while there were early attempts at making the cake, this is not a just a monthlong phenomenon. Cakes are being baked within days of this piece's writing. Whipping cream cake has truly captured the imagination of the old recipe community.
Traces of this old dessert elude casual scrutiny
As the subreddit is called Old Recipes, the recipes included are expected to have some storied sense to them. This whipping cream cake recipe is no different. In the second picture shared by Redditor jamie_of_house_m, it is revealed that their husband's grandmother received the recipe as a part of a cookbook celebrating the centennial of Elliott, their town in Iowa founded in 1879.
Moreover, while the cake does not enjoy the heavy documentation of red velvet cake, traces of its past do appear with a skim, though a concrete history is lacking. For example, throughout the internet, there floats a recipe for Elvis Presley's Favorite Whipping Cream Pound Cake. The recipes available online all follow either an identical path to the whipping cream cake recipe on Reddit or have such slight variations to them that they are clearly from the same idea.
While the source expressing the King's love of this cake has been swallowed by history, a 2019 YouTube video by Glen and Friends Cooking shows that the cake was contemporaneous with his childhood. The video shows how to make whipping cream cake from a cookbook published the year after Presley's birth in 1935.
If we allow ourselves to speculate, it seems possible that the cake emerged from the necessities of the Great Depression. The incredibly simple ingredient list lends itself to an environment of scarcity. Either way, whipping cream cake has been rediscovered and now enjoys a booming popularity.