Skillet Cream Cake

a simple, small batch recipe with milk chocolate buttercream

Over the years I’ve amassed a small collection of vintage cookbooks. They provide a portal to the past. Flip through a few pages of cookbooks from various decades and you’ll notice how we’ve evolved, or perhaps devolved, as cooks. Cake recipes were often written with directions like bake in a moderate oven, today’s equivalent to bake at 350ºF. Top milk is an ingredient in older recipes, reminiscent of a time when fresh milk was delivered by a milkman, and a thick layer would settle at the top of the bottle. It wasn’t quite cream but richer than what we think of as whole milk, probably the closest equivalent to it today would be substituting half and half in a recipe. 

Directions like combining sugar and butter, a beginning point for many cake recipes were simply “cream butter and sugar”. More detailed directions like “until light and fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes” which are more commonplace today, would follow decades later. Reading through these old cookbooks is a study in cultural anthropology. 

While I’ve not done any formal study on this subject, reading through my collection of cookbooks spanning from the late 1890s to modern day, it is easy to see how every invention that enabled us to rely less on cooking as the main way of feeding ourselves, also meant recipe instructions had to become more detailed to fill in the gaps of people’s knowledge when they did decide to fire up the stove.

Baking, especially, was less the sport it is today, and more a part of everyday life. One-bowl recipes are all the rage now but more often than not, that was the way cakes were made 80 years ago. Our ancestors were the original food waste warriors out of a matter of necessity, hence using that top milk to enrich soups or sauces.

I’ve gone down a rabbit hole, and need to dig myself out of it, so let’s talk about this cream cake. I first shared a variation of the recipe years back on In Jennie’s Kitchen, and recently decided to tinker with it some more. You’ll notice there is one ingredient missing from this cake recipe, and it is not a typo. Yes, there is no butter in this cake. The fat needed to enrich the cake comes from simply using heavy cream. This also means you can ditch the hand or stand mixer, and just reach for a whisk, wooden spoon and bowl.

The orange zest in the cake is a nice compliment to the milk chocolate butter cream I used to frost it. You can leave out the zest, if you like. You can also make many variations on this cake by simply swapping in lemon or lime zest, and going with a different frosting. A lemon-scented cake would be nice with a thin vanilla glaze or fluffy cream cheese frosting. Lime zest in the cake begs for a coconut frosting. Not frosting the cake is also an option, making it more suitable for eating a wedge with coffee for breakfast.

Hopefully you’re enjoying the extended daylight as much as I am. In just one month’s time, we’ll be enjoying 7pm sunsets. Be well, and be kind. –xo, j.