Food Matters: Cueno's Bakery's rum cake, baking with parchment

Cuneo's famous rum cake revival

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.

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

Pleasures of parchment

It only takes one time of using wax paper instead of parchment paper when baking a sheet of cookies to learn that the two often-confused products aren't interchangeable. After the smoke from the wax paper clears the kitchen, you can read the fine print that says it's not meant for baking, unless lining a cake pan, where the paraffin wax is covered completely.

The French technique of "en papillote" means to wrap in paper and is most often used for fish, but food writer Brette Sember goes beyond en papillote in her new book, "The Parchment Paper Cookbook" (Adams Media, $17.95). Parchment allows you to use less oil than other cooking methods, and because it creates a tight seal in which you cook meat or vegetables, they stay moist when baked instead of drying out. Parchment is more expensive than wax paper or aluminum foil, but it can be reused if lining something like a cookie sheet.