Sesame Coconut Crunch Cake

Author Notes

A few blocks away from my first apartment in NYC was an Entenmann's Bakery Outlet. You could peer in and see towers of glossy blue-and-white boxes and crinkly cellophane-sealed treats. Sugar is my siren song, so I responded. Twenty minutes later, dizzy with choice, late afternoon sun blinding me, I snagged a Louisiana Crunch Cake. Back home, I discovered this was a tube of impossibly soft, vaguely coconutty yellow cake with a thin shellacking of glaze. I also discovered that slice after slice was disappearing at an alarming rate. When I returned a week later to stock up, the store, like a chimera, had vanished. A fluttering vinyl banner was the only reminder of its existence.

I gave up looking for the box on the shelf and decided to re-create my memory of it. For the loftiest, tenderest, most cottony cake, I turned to reverse-creaming, a mixing technique pioneered by Rose Levy Beranbaum, living legend and dear friend. It has the added advantage of being much quicker than the traditional cream the butter and sugar way. For the best texture, bleached cake flour is a must. Nerdy types like me will appreciate knowing that bleaching alters the flour’s acidity and structure, enabling an airy but close-grained interior. (Also? Hate to break it to ya, but the oft-repeated suggestion of cutting all-purpose flour with cornstarch just isn’t the same. Sorry.) For a pervasive crunch, in homage to the benne seeds of the South, there’s sesame in addition to the coconut that clings to the pan. Once baked, the entire cake is encrusted with a delicate snap-crackle-pop.

So where did this cake come from? The earliest mention I could find is in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from July 1941. In a column called Food Frontiers, Margaret Pettigrew wrote that “the glamour girl of desserts to sweeten the Summer menu is Crunch Cake” from Mammy’s Pantry, a Southern-style restaurant on Montague Street in Brooklyn. She described the cake as “golden, flavorsome and feathery light,” piled high with meringue. Very different from the current iteration, and also without the specificity of Louisiana.

A few years later, in 1949, The Daily Register (in Red Bank, New Jersey) shared a flyer from Acme Markets advertising a Louisiana Crunch Cake for 45 cents. The enticing copy declared it a “luscious golden cake made with fresh oranges, delicious crunchy crust, made of tasty macaroon crunch.” There’s a picture of a lady, hair pulled back, in a dress with a scalloped collar, holding a hefty ring cake.

Most recipes online reference the Entenmann’s version as their inspiration. In all likelihood, the predecessor to the Entenmann’s one may have started in Burny Brothers Bakery in Chicago—a series of ads and coupons from the bakery mentioning the cake pepper newspapers in the ’50s. In the late ’70s, Entenmann’s acquired Burny Brothers. And so I like to think that the cake I saw through the glass all those years ago is a treasured heirloom, in its own commercial way.

—Shilpa Uskokovic