Chocolate cake brings back childhood memory

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, May 24, 2016

A few years ago, Janet Plum of Kingsville, Maryland, wrote wanting help locating the recipe for a favorite chocolate cake from her childhood; it was made by a German bakery in downtown Baltimore called Doebereiner’s in the ’40s and ’50s.

At the time of her original request, in September 2014, I never heard from anyone about the recipe. Then, as sometimes happens with this column, I received a letter out of nowhere recently from Audrey Crooks of Reisterstown, Maryland. She had located her copy of the recipe she thought was likely the one that Plum was in search of. It had been given to Crooks some years ago by her former next-door neighbor, Peggy Sindall, who is the daughter of Doebereiner’s owner George Doebereiner.

In a column in The Baltimore Sun in 2003, Jacques Kelly reminisced about weekly visits with his family to George Doebereiner’s bakery and ice cream parlor. The sweet shop was well known for what many people swore were the finest sweets. According to Kelly, the bakery closed sometime around 1953. But clearly, memories of the wonderful baked goods sold there live on.

This recipe is for an old-fashioned and straightforward three-layer chocolate cake. Perhaps the secret to the cake’s deliciousness was the quality of the ingredients and the care with which it was made at the Doebereiner bakery.

Requests

Bonnie Engelskirch, who grew up in Baltimore and now lives in Georgetown, Delaware, is looking for the recipe for the Federal Hill cake made famous by Muhly’s Bakery in Baltimore. The bakery is closed now, but she was hoping someone might have the recipe.

Mary Kelly of Chase, Maryland, is in search of the recipe for a chocolate devil’s food cake that was on the jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise many years ago.