If you happen to’ve ever visited Maryland, odds are excessive you have caught a fork right into a slice of what is now often known as Smith Island Cake. The formally designated state dessert consists of no less than seven layers of yellow or white cake with cooked fudge icing unfold in between, making for one wealthy, chocolatey slice that solely critical candy tooths might be able to end.

This famed dessert is way over your fundamental layer cake, nonetheless. Smith Island Cake dates to the early 1900s and has a little bit of a romantic historical past.

What Is Smith Island Cake?

The residents of Smith Island—solely round 200 stay at present—have lengthy made their residing within the fishing trade. When the lads would head out on Chesapeake Bay, usually for per week at a time, their wives despatched them on their means with sustenance within the type of this cake, says Elaine Eff, retired Maryland state folklorist who helped to develop a museum for the island.

The rationale for the cake was three-fold: The lads beloved sugar, they wanted it for the vitality increase, and all of the layers of chocolate icing helped to maintain the cake moist. To not point out, a big hunk of cake was so candy, it could theoretically last more than an everyday piece of cake. Discuss a saccharine sendoff, proper?

Smith Island Cake’s quite a few skinny layers weren’t a lot a murals as a necessity, although, explains Eff.

To know its beginnings, contemplate the time: Smith Island did not get electrical energy till the Fifties—a number of a long time after many of the remainder of the nation—so residence cooks needed to make do with wooden stoves. To whip up desserts, they’d “bake” with a steel field set atop their range. As you possibly can think about, getting a thicker cake layer to rise and bake by means of was practically not possible. As an alternative, they received inventive, pouring a small quantity of batter in a number of pans and repeating the method a number of instances.

With out electrical energy, you are additionally and not using a fridge. That is why the unique Smith Island Cake chocolate icing was made up of sugar and chocolate. No butter meant it did not require refrigeration, both at residence or out on the water with the fishermen.

Two recipes are extensively considered the originals for “from the stump” (i.e., produced from scratch) Smith Island Cake. The primary, from Frances Kitching’s 1994 e book “Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook,” requires a whopping 4 cups of sugar between the cake and icing, and 10 nine-inch pans.

The second, from Mary Ada Marshall—a former Smith Islander now based mostly in Tylerton, Md., who’s been making the cake for many years—affords a little bit of a shortcut, beginning with a field of Duncan Hines yellow cake combine.

Get the Recipe: Mary Ada’s Smith Island Cake

The place to Purchase Smith Island Truffles

Right this moment, a bit, however not an excessive amount of, has modified. A spread of recipes for Smith Island Cake name for buttercream frosting, and bakeries all through Maryland now bake and ship tens of 1000’s of truffles across the nation. (You’ll be able to even purchase one by means of Goldbelly).

Smith Island Baking Firm of Crisfield studies promoting round 30,000 Smith Island Truffles per yr, equating to about 250 a day. Traditional Truffles, in Salisbury, Md., is owned by two native Smith Island girls who’ve been baking truffles for practically 20 years and now produce greater than 20 flavors of Smith Island Cake.

Household-owned Smith Island Bakery is the one remaining industrial bakery on the island itself, housed within the constructing the place the very first cake bakery was positioned.

“We felt it was necessary to convey the cake making again to Smith Island, the place it originated,” says co-owner Kathey Jones. She provides that the eating places on Smith Island bake their very own truffles in home, and a number of the island girls nonetheless make truffles and promote them out of their properties, often known as cottage bakers.

Whereas Smith Island Bakery’s course of is proprietary, “I do not assume there’s any large secret to the recipe,” says Jones. “It is all [about] how Grandma taught you to make them.”

Then and now, “the cake,” as locals say, is far more than cake. Smith Island is geographically remoted as Maryland’s solely inhabited island out there solely by water, and most households nonetheless make a residing on the water. Males sometimes go to work pre-dawn, and their wives choose the crabs they catch and assist in the shanties fishing smooth crabs in season, says Wendy Robertson, tourism supervisor at Somerset County Recreation, Parks & Tourism, simply throughout the Tangier Sound from Smith Island. Nonetheless, their lifestyle is rapidly disappearing, and Smith Island Cake represents a supplemental earnings for cottage bakers and a method to make ends meet, Robertson provides.

That is a giant purpose that, practically 15 years in the past, a number of state organizations rallied to advocate for a invoice that will designate Smith Island Cake because the state’s official state dessert. Talking to legislators by means of their stomachs, they delivered fastidiously plated slices of cake to every member of the Common Meeting in Annapolis. The invoice handed, and the cake earned its rightful title as State Dessert of Maryland in 2008.

“For the reason that designation, the cake has served as an envoy of kinds, heightening consciousness of the island and offering an financial increase not solely to custom bearers however to the area as nicely,” says Robertson.

If that is not a candy purpose to order a Smith Island cake and take pleasure in a slice, or attempt your hand at whipping up your personal, we do not know what’s. As Eff attests, Smith Island Cake is a crucial a part of the islanders’ tradition.

“[On a trip years ago], I went from home to accommodate and visited with crabbers and oyster males and sea captains and housewives and retailer homeowners, and each single home I went to… invited me in for a chunk of cake,’” says Eff. “Lastly I mentioned, ‘This isn’t cake, that is very particular.’”