My great-uncle's 'whiskey cake' recipe turned into a brick last night

I was making it for a family thing today, following his handwritten card from 1962. The recipe calls for a cup of buttermilk, but I only had regular milk and figured it was close enough. The cake came out dense and didn't rise at all, just a solid brown block. I guess that old-time buttermilk was doing a real job. Has anyone else had a family recipe fail because you swapped one simple thing?

3 comments

3 Comments

mia_anderson28d ago

Mary, have you ever tried adding a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to regular milk to fake buttermilk? I've done that a handful of times when I was out of the real stuff and it worked decently. But I'm wondering if that 1962 recipe might have been written for a different kind of buttermilk to begin with. My grandma's old recipes always called for cultured buttermilk, not the stuff she made by accident. Do you think the age of the recipe matters for something like this? I'm curious if those older recipes assumed a thicker, more acidic buttermilk than what we buy in cartons now.

mary6143mo ago

Oh man, that's the worst. I read somewhere that buttermilk's acidity is a big deal in old recipes. It reacts with baking soda to make the cake rise. Regular milk just doesn't do that. I tried using yogurt instead of sour cream in my grandma's coffee cake once. Same deal, total doorstop. Those old ingredients were doing heavy lifting we didn't even know about.

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riley_ramirez813mo agoMost Upvoted

Actually I've swapped them all the time and my stuff turns out fine. You just need to adjust the other liquids a bit.