Recipe: Hartford Election Cake, Updated

It begins at Ocean State Job Lot. I'd been fascinated by the store since first moving back to Connecticut seven years ago. I looked over at it countless times, thinking "Someday..." But I never went in until a few weeks ago.

I had expected dimly lit aisles full of gym socks with one deformed toe and boxes of toothpaste that just might have fallen off the back of a truck in 1985. And that's pretty much exactly what I found. (Along with racks of strange clothing, a curious assortment of packaged food, stacks of carpets, creepy little figurines, and about a million other things I didn't need.) There were also two large shelves full of very heavy, very glossy, very price-reduced cookbooks. I don't know if OSJL is always a cornucopia of deeply discounted cookbooks or if this was a fluke occurrence, but I could not resist. I walked out with a copy of United Cakes of America: Recipes Celebrating Every State by Warren Brown (full price $29.95) for $3.99.

Here's why I had to buy this book: Connecticut's cake is actually representative of Connecticut. Most food-by-state lists I've read treat Connecticut like an afterthought, sticking it with the one recipe they had no better place for but nevertheless wanted to include. This one, though, gets it right: Connecticut's dessert is an updated version of Hartford Election Cake.

 

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