Becka’s Cake

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An heirloom from my grandaunt – slightly modernized. Not that it needed it very much. The old lady was very up-to-date. Like always (Rcp# 52).


Ingredients for ‘Becka’s Cake’

  • ½ cup shortening (= 8 tablespoons or 115g, can be substituted with 145g plant-based butter)
  • 1 cup granulated sugar (= 16 tablespoons or 200g, use a little less than 1 cup raw cane sugar)
  • 1 overripe banana (replaces 1 egg plus some → more creaminess)
  • 1 cup high quality applesauce (= 16 tablespoons or 250 g/ml, the original recipe called for ‘thick strained applesauce’,see [‘The Apple Pulp Connection’])
  • 2 cups sifted cake flour (= 32 tablespoons or 230g, I used a gluten-free cake flour made from whole grain millet flour, corn flour, rice flour, and guar gum)
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon baking soda (or 4 teaspoons baking powder, omitting the baking soda)
  • 1 cup dried apricots, finely diced (15 whole dried fruits = about 110 g)
  • ¾ cup chopped sweet almonds (about 30g)
  • ½ teaspoon cinnamon (good strong cinnamon, if using regular cinnamon use up to 1 teaspoon)
  • ½ teaspoon allspice
  • freshly ground nutmeg
  • ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • Canola oil to grease the pan
  • You will also need: an 8-inch baking pan or an 18-cm diameter baking form

Baking Instructions for ‘Becka’s Cake’

  1. Cream together shortening and sugar.
  2. Mix the banana puree with the applesauce, salt and spices (cinnamon, allspice, ground nutmeg and cloves). Then add the butter-sugar cream and mix well (use hand mixer and mixing bowl). If you are using shortening, add two tablespoons of drinking water.
  3. Sift the flour to remove any lumps. Make a hole in the flour to ‘hide’ the baking powder and soda, then mix thoroughly.
  4. Gradually add the flour to the creamed mixture.
  5. Stir in the apricots and almonds.
  6. Pour into a greased baking dish or pan.
  7. Bake in 350°F (preheated, equivalent to 175°C, convection only) oven at mid-height for 45 – 55 minutes, then let cool in pan.

Side Notes:

  1. If you want to replace shortening with butter (vegetable or otherwise), you have to increase the amount a bit and decrease the amount of liquid in the recipe at the same time, because shortening is 100% fat and butter (vegetable or otherwise) usually has a water content of about 20%.
  2. The original version of this recipe was written down 60 to 70 years ago by my grandaunt Becka, whose cooking journal I inherited. She was born at the end of the 19th century (she was the much older sister of my grandfather) in a village that is now part of Bremen in northern Germany. She and her engineer husband were quite adventurous. They traveled the world while she worked as a cook and he worked as a mechanic and chauffeur. They lived in California and Chicago, among other places. She was a wonderful and very organized lady whom I truly loved and admired as a child. I mentioned her in the Table Talk with my friend Dawn in the [‘Well Traveled’] post.
  3. Aunt Becka called this cake ‘Applesauce Cake’ and rated it “Very Good”. So I guess she loved making it. I hope you follow in her footsteps.

Please note: For all my recipes (text) on this blog (By MagS, Parsley-Lane Blog) I grant a CC license under the terms of BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further explanations, please see the Legal Notice or visit creativecommons.org.