Paula Johns's Recipe

Alfred Lunt's Sunday Cake

Category: Sweets

2/3 cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup cake flour, measured after sifting
Butter and bread crumbs or flour for pan

Heat oven to 325 degrees.
Beat the butter until creamy and light, about 5 minutes. Set aside. Beat sugar and eggs together until light, 5-8 minutes with an electric mixer. Do not under-beat; The batter should slowly fall in a ribbon from the beater. Beat sugar mixture into the creamed butter, then add the vanilla.

Whisk the baking poweder and slat into the flour. Gradually fold dry ingredients into the batter by hand. Don't try this with an electric mixer.

Butter an 8 inch cast iron frying pan or round cake pan. Sprinkle with very fine bread or cracker crumbs or flour. Turn pan around to coat evenly and dump out excess crumbs. Pour in batter and bake 1 hour ( I baked mine only about 25 minutes, but found it was ready). Turn out at once to cool on a wire rack. ( Eating this warm was so good!) I did not coat with powdered sugar or add anything but, it can be done. ( Also, be careful with this cake removing it from the pan, I may have removed my cake too early from the oven, because it did break when I lifted it to put it on the wire rack. Over half the cake fell on the floor! But, the cake that was left was so good! Perhaps you can watch yours closely and see if you can cook it a bit longer, but don't let it dry out!

I found this published in my local newspaper by Linda Cicero. Writers send in questions and she answers them. She was able to find what she believed was the recipe that the question person sent in:

She suggests using 1tsp of vanilla instead of 1/4 tsp. She also suggests the zest of a lemon to make it mor like a Madeira. She also added the salt, because the handwritten recipe she found of Lunt's was incomplete.

I used butter and bread crumbs to coat the bottom of the pan.

I cooked it with 1/4 vanilla, and did not add the zest; I also used a cast iron frying pan 8", this cake is a different texture and so delicious! You will want to save this recipe to bake over and over!