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After my last post I got the idea to go look through the box of my mother’s old cookbooks, that I had saved after she died. I plan on passing them on to my daughters when they get married or move out on their own.

I looked to see if my mother had any extra recipes in her Better Homes and Garden’s cook book and found some beautifully typed up pages added in to many of the sections. The pages were all cut to mimic the actual pages in the cookbook,and were so perfectly matched to the original pages in the cookbook, that you never would have known they were there until you actually looked through each section of recipes. The dividers for each section are thick and stiff like a pressboard file, and larger than the recipe pages in the cookbook, so you can’t just flip through this cookbook, by fanning the pages.

My mother had many of her recipes in her head, by the time I was old enough to help cook, so she rarely consulted a cook book. In her senior years my sisters and I had asked her to write down some of her cake recipes that we remembered from our youth, but she couldn’t remember them and didn’t remember where she had gotten them, or if they were written down anywhere.

Needless to say, once I realized that there were her typed up pages hidden in the cook book, I immediately turned to the cake section and lo and behold, there were the cake recipes I remembered from my child hood. I will get them all typed up on my computer and share them on this thread as I get them completed.

After typing up the first of the recipes I realized that my mother had no cooking temperatures or cooking times on most of her typed up cake recipes. They also don’t say what size pan to use, and many other things we take for granted in recipes today. Some are nothing more than a list of ingredients with no instructions whatsoever.

I am going to have to actually cook them a time or two to make sure they turn out correctly before I actually share them with all of you, so it may be several weeks before I get them all posted to the list. Fortunately, I helped my mother make these cakes when I was little, so now that I have the ingredient lists, I should be able to figure out the cooking times and the appropriate size pan.

Of course my mother often doubled the recipes so that a square 8x8 pan recipe could fill a 9x13 size cake pan, so I really need to mix up the batter to be able to judge what size pan is best for the recipe and bake them first to make sure I am doing it correctly.

I took out some butter to soften and I am going to try to make her applesauce cake this weekend, since this was one of my favorite cakes as a child. I made this one a lot of times with my mother as a child, since it was my father’s favorite cake as well, so it should be the easiest one for me to figure out.

In reading through all the cake recipes I found that one recipe calls for speck salt and salt. Does any one know what speck salt is? My guess is that speck salt might be coarse Kosher salt, since I remember having a coarse Kosher salt in the house that we used when we were making pickles or curing fish, and I know it could be used for curing meats as well. The only definitions I could find for speck all refer to cured meat.