Posted on 08/02/2022 6:29:56 PM PDT by simpson96
Seventy years ago, when Arlene McCardle was a 19-year-old on the cusp of 20, she entered what later would be known as the Pillsbury Bake-Off, making the contest deadline just in time.
She became Wisconsin's sole junior finalist on the strength of her recipe. McCardle baked her Venetian Cocoanut Cake at the competition in December 1952 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York â a four-layer sponge cake with alternating layers of pudding-like vanilla and chocolate fillings, topped with toasted coconut. (Cocoanut was an old variation on coconut still in use into the midcentury.)
Pillsbury published the junior winner's recipe the next year in a booklet touting "100 Prize-Winning Recipes" from Pillsbury's fourth Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest (Bake-Off turned out to be a catchier contest name, Pillsbury later decided).
Pillsbury also decided that the cake would be called Venetian Cream-Filled Layers in the booklet.
The booklet cost consumers 25 cents; sold across the country, it assured McCardle a measure of national fame. Milwaukee-area newspapers had already written about her trip to New York; the yellowed clippings are framed and hang in her kitchen on Milwaukee's far north side, in the house where she's lived with her family since 1965.
She never baked the cake again, she said.
That is, until recently. She baked the legendary cake for the first time with her daughters, visiting from California and Nevada to mark her 90th birthday. McCardle, a mother of six, turned 90 on July 24. Her husband, Michael McCardle, a Milwaukee police detective, was killed in a car accident when their youngest was just nine days old.
(Excerpt) Read more at jsonline.com ...
bkmk for later.
She may have made it so many times preparing for competition that she was sick of it :-)
Too tell you the truth, I miss my grandma way more than I miss my mom.
Maybe....Maybe, but we will never know, because Carol Deptolla, “journalist” didn’t ask the one very obvious question.
Well, I guess it wouldn’t make a very good story if the lady just said, ‘I wasn’t interested anymore...’ :-)
Seinfeld and Muffin Stumps
Always turned my Tummy.
:-)
Nooo....
may I suggest pig piking cake at the Jewish social?
latkes...
T-Fal or Calphalon?
Calphalon
“....Besides the trip to New York, McCardle won a Mixmaster, an electric range that she didn’t keep because her kitchen was outfitted for a gas stove, and a kitchen dining set. She still has the table and a chair from that set in her laundry room.”
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My Mom had a Mixmaster. She did a lot of baking and cooking and also canned veg from our garden, fruits from the store.
In the last few years I took over most of the cooking duties from my wife. I have some of my Mom’s tools and cookbooks and I think about her just about every time I cook.
Memories like that mean so much. It’s sad to think of how very few of the younger generation(s) cook anything at all. Can’t be bothered, when they can order things up and someone else will do it for them. Besides the money-saving aspect, they don’t even know what they’re missing out on.
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