Homemade Yellow Cake Mix — The Stack Cake Betty Would Approve Of

I turn fifty on March 30th. Eleven days. I'm going to spend those eleven days pretending I'm still forty-nine, which is a decade I understood and inhabited comfortably. Forty-nine is still "late forties." Fifty is "fifty." The prefix changes everything. You go from "he's in his forties" to "he's fifty" and the sentence gains weight, like someone added a stone to the bag you're carrying.

But before fifty, I want to close out year two of this blog. Two years. One hundred and four weeks. I started this thing in a kitchen in Lexington trying to write down my mother's soup beans before they disappeared. Two years later, I've written about soup beans and fried chicken and stack cake and brisket and ramps and pawpaws and a hundred other recipes that connect me to a place I left and a woman I came from and a life that shaped me into the man standing at this stove.

Year two was harder than year one. Year one was discovery — finding the recipes, finding the voice, finding the audience. Year two was the year Clay decided to go to war and the blog became the place where I processed that decision one recipe at a time. I cooked through fear. I cooked through grief. I cooked through the specific helplessness of watching your child choose danger when safety was offered. The cooking didn't fix anything. But it kept my hands busy and my mind focused and it produced meals that kept the family fed, and feeding people is a form of love and love is a form of resistance against the things we can't control.

Betty sent a stack cake for my birthday — sent it with Dale, who drove it up on Saturday. Eight layers. Perfect. Better than mine will ever be. I ate a slice standing in the kitchen and it tasted like every birthday I've ever had, from the first one I remember (five, candles on the kitchen table in Evarts, Earl in his mining clothes because he'd just come home) to this one (fifty, almost, standing in a kitchen in Lexington, wondering what the next decade holds).

Here's what the next decade holds: Clay ships in July. Amber graduates nursing school in May 2019. Travis is going to marry Jolene — he hasn't said it yet but I can see it the way I can see rain coming by the color of the sky. Betty is going to need more help. My back is going to get worse. The cookbook is going to get written. Connie is going to be there for all of it, steady as a mountain, tough as the rock underneath.

And the blog will keep going. Monday is soup beans. The week has a recipe. The recipe has a story. The story has a life inside it. One hundred and four weeks down. The soup is on. The light is returning. Year three begins.

Betty’s cake did what no recipe of mine has ever quite managed — it tasted like memory itself, all eight layers of it. I’ve been making versions of stack cake for two years now, ever since I started chasing down the recipes that connect me to Eastern Kentucky, and I still can’t match hers. But I’ve gotten close enough to understand what she’s doing: thin, almost cookie-like yellow cake layers pressed together with sweetened spiced apple, left overnight so the whole thing fuses into something that’s more than the sum of its parts. That’s the recipe below — my best working version of the cake that tasted like fifty years of birthdays and the woman who keeps sending them my way.

Appalachian Stack Cake with Spiced Dried Apple Filling

Prep Time: 45 min | Cook Time: 40 min | Total Time: 1 hr 25 min (plus overnight rest) | Servings: 12–16

Ingredients

For the cake layers:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup sorghum molasses (or unsulphured blackstrap molasses)
• 1/2 cup whole buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

For the dried apple filling:

• 1 lb dried apples (about 4 cups loosely packed)
• 4 cups water
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• Pinch of salt

Instructions

1. Make the filling first. Combine dried apples and water in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until apples are very soft and most of the liquid is absorbed, about 25–30 minutes. Mash with a potato masher or wooden spoon until you have a thick, chunky paste. Stir in brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and salt. Taste and adjust spices. Let cool completely before using — filling can be made up to two days ahead and refrigerated.
2. Preheat and prep pans. Heat oven to 375°F. Grease three 9-inch round cake pans and line bottoms with parchment. If you only have one or two pans, you will bake in batches — this is normal for stack cake.
3. Mix the dry ingredients. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, ginger, and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Set aside.
4. Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar with a hand mixer or stand mixer on medium-high until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Beat in molasses and vanilla. The mixture may look slightly curdled — that’s fine.
5. Combine wet and dry. Reduce mixer to low. Alternate adding the flour mixture and buttermilk in three additions, beginning and ending with flour, mixing just until combined after each addition. The batter will be stiff, closer to a soft dough than a pourable cake batter — this is correct.
6. Divide and bake thin layers. Divide dough evenly among prepared pans, using about 3/4 cup of batter per pan. Use floured fingers or an offset spatula to press and spread the dough as thin and even as possible to the edges. Bake 10–12 minutes until layers are set and the edges are just turning golden. They should feel dry to the touch but not hard. Cool in pans 5 minutes, then turn out onto wire racks. Repeat with remaining batter until you have 6 to 8 layers total.
7. Assemble the stack. Place the first cooled layer on a cake plate or stand. Spread a generous 1/3 cup of apple filling evenly across the top, all the way to the edges. Stack the next layer directly on top and repeat with filling. Continue until all layers are stacked, ending with a plain cake layer on top. Do not put filling on the top layer.
8. Rest overnight. Wrap the assembled cake loosely in plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours, and preferably overnight. This is not optional — the moisture from the filling migrates into the layers and transforms the texture from firm to tender. The cake is better on day two than day one, and better still on day three.
9. Serve. Dust the top lightly with powdered sugar if you like, or leave it plain the way it came from Betty’s kitchen. Cut into thin wedges — this cake is rich and a little goes a long way. Serve at room temperature.

Nutrition (per serving, based on 14 servings)

Calories: 310 | Protein: 4g | Fat: 8g | Carbs: 57g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 185mg