Ranch Cake

For my high school graduation, two of my lovely aunts put together a book of family recipes for me. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't actually tried many of the recipes, but really that's not entirely my fault. Grandma Funk's lasagna? Yes! Great Grandma Backman's lemon bars? Of course! Great Great Grandma Phelps' suet pudding? Um....yum?

My favorite recipe in the book is for Ranch Cake because I absolutely love my Great Grandma Byrd's notes on the recipe:

"When I grew up on a ranch in Montana, we often had a lot of men to cook for. We were too busy to follow a recipe in a cookbook, so we had a standard cake recipe we used to make a spice cake or white or chocolate. We did not have cake mixes at that time. And we did not have a modern stove - just an old coal and wood black stove. When we made this cake, we usually made a test cake before baking it. We put some batter in a small pan or on a piece of brown paper and baked it. If this test cake "fell" we added more flour to the cake batter before baking it."

What I love about this recipe is how imprecise it is - it actually says "2 cups flour (or more)." She also says that they would frost it with a brown sugar frosting "if we had brown sugar" or with whipped cream "because we had so much of it." Can you imagine living in a place where brown sugar is a scarcity but you never run out of whipped cream?

We made the chocolate version of the cake (and it rose just fine with only two cups of flour) and frosted half with whipped cream and the other with brown sugar frosting. Michael and I both agreed that it was good but not the best cake we'd ever had, but Eli says, "We should have ranch cake more often!"