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Cuneo’s rum cake is light on the booze, heavy on the nostalgia
It’s been 50 years since Cuneo’s Bakery on Guadalupe Street closed, but people can’t seem to forget the bakery’s legendary rum cake.
Monica Kass Rogers, a longtime food writer in Chicago who digs up long lost recipes for her site, LostRecipesFound.com, received a request for Cuneo’s rum cake earlier this year. She was able to track down Rita Bruton and James Kennedy, whose dad, Ray Kennedy, was the production manager at Cueno’s for many years. After Kennedy left Cuneo’s in the early 1950s, he worked another 25 years at Ms. Johnson’s Bakery. Ray Kennedy was in his 60s when he retired, says his son, James. “A lot of people tried to get him to open a specialty shop, but when we retired, he was ready to be done.”
Ray Kennedy died in 2003, but his children still had the recipe for the famous cake, which the Statesman ran in 1977 and Kass Rogers adapted for home cooks who aren’t baking on a commercial scale.
When Kass Rogers served the cake to guests at her house, she realized why memories of the cake outlasted the bakery. “People were going crazy over that cake,” Kass Rogers says. “It really has something to do with that syrup. … One of my sons says this is now his favorite cake ever.”
Next year, the site will evolve to allow readers to help one another track down lost recipes, but for now, it’s Kass Rogers who gets to hunt down almost forgotten favorites. “Everybody has a recipe that they’ve loved, but lost,” she says. You can read more about Kass Rogers’ hunt for the rum cake - and find stories about other recipes and tell her about one you’ve always wanted to find - at LostRecipesFound.com.
When I got to work this morning, I had an reader email about this article, which ran in Food Matters, that made me laugh.
Thanks so very much for the historic article about Cuneo’s Rum Cake.
My mother was chief deputy county clerk in Longview, Gregg County. She had to come to Austin during the first week of December every year for a conference concerning new laws which would become effective or other such matters pertinent to county clerk operations statewide. I remember it was always the first week of December because she was never home for my birthday.
She always took orders from other courthouse employees for the famous Cuneo’s Rum Cake for upcoming Christmas parties. Every year she would “bootleg” 30 to 40 cakes back to Gregg County. She often commented that if she ever had a wreck with all those rum cakes in her station wagon and their attendant aroma, the highway patrol would lock her up so far in a back cell of the jail they would have to pump her sunlight.
Sterlin Barton Thrall, Texas
Cuneo’s Famous Rum Cake
For cake:
4 cups cake flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
4 cups sugar
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup shortening
6 eggs
1/2 tsp. lemon extract
1/2 tsp. orange extract
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup milk
For butter-rum syrup:
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp. corn syrup
2 Tbsp. butter
2 tsp. rum extract
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Generously grease 10-inch angel-food tube pan. Trace and cut out a paper liner for the bottom round of the tube cake pan. Place in the bottom round and grease again over the paper.
Sift together cake flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
In bowl of a standing mixer, beat sugar and butter and shortening together. Slowly (one or two at a time) add eggs in, beating between additions. Beat for three minutes. When batter is fluffy, add extracts. Mix in dry ingredients in two batches, alternating with the milk.
Pour batter into the prepared tube pan and bake for 1 1/2 hours. Test for doneness by poking a toothpick into the center of the cake. When the toothpick comes out clean and crumb-free, the cake is done. (Be sure to bake this for a full 1 1/2 hours at 325 degrees. The cake forms a crust as you bake so touching the top won’t indicate doneness.) Remove cake from oven and let rest for 15 minutes.
While cake is resting, make butter-rum syrup. Stirring constantly, mix sugar, salt, water,corn syrup and butter in small saucepan and heat until syrup begins to thicken and bubble. Remove from heat. Let cool slightly. Mix in rum extract.
Using a sharp knife, loosen cake from sides of the pan. Invert pan onto a foil-covered plate and remove pan center, using a sharp knife as needed to separate pan center from what is now the top of the cake. Remove paper from top of cake. Brush or pour syrup all over cake. Remove cake to a clean platter and serve. Cake keeps well wrapped in foil.
— Adapted from a recipe by Ray Kennedy
Photo by Neal Douglass, Austin History Center.
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By Lisa O'Neill
December 1, 2011 2:39 PM | Link to this
Thx for the story & esp the recipe. Can’t wait to try it out! I’m already dreaming about it.