grandma's crumb cake

My first project is a favorite treat of mine from childhood that is associated with my maternal grandmother, Angie Degennaro. Grandma is 92 years old, which means she was born in this wonderful borough of Brooklyn in 1918. She lived in Bensonhurst until the mid-1950s when she and my grandfather moved their two daughters out to Lindenhurst on Long Island.

Her crumb cake recipe comes from a spiral-bound cookbook called “Our Family Recipes,” a collection of family specialties and favorites that was compiled by my cousin, Patty Ruvolo, back in 1991. Grandma gave me a copy of the recipe book after my grandfather, Guido, passed away and she cleared all their possessions out of the house in Lindenhurst so she could move in with my Aunt Pam in West Babylon. The cookbook looks like it was put together using the old program The Print Shop and printed at home on a dot-matrix printer. Each recipe comes with the name of the person who submitted it to the cookbook, and quite a few stains from where a splash of something got away from my grandmother in the kitchen. There are lots of Degennaros, Ruvolos, Critellis and others in the pages of this book, which also contains the very coveted recipes for my Mom’s linzer tarts and my great-aunt Olga’s cream puff shells – both recipes I will be attempting later in the year.

This crumb cake recipe was not actually submitted by Grandma, but my cousin Virginia “Ginger” Degennaro. I picked it as my first project for it’s sentimental value and the fact that it utilizes store-bought yellow cake mix. Since this one is not a closely-kept family secret, nor is it the property of a published author, I figured I would post this one in full, something I might not be able to do each week.

1 box yellow cake mix

            - prepare as directed and bake in 13 x 9 pan.

Mix     2c flour

            2/3c sugar

            2t cinnamon

            2 sticks melted butter

            1t vanilla

When cake is 2/3 done or golden on top. Crumble mixture on top. Finish baking. Sprinkle powered sugar on top.

The tossing aside of traditional recipe-writing in a step-by-step fashion combined with the spelling mistake of “powered” sugar made it absolutely necessary that I post Ginger’s recipe verbatim here.

I started with the yellow cake, and following the instructions on the back of the box, I combined the cake mix with eggs, vegetable oil and water. I got this:

Then the recipe called for me to beat the mixture together for 30 seconds using the electric beater that I don’t have. Luckily, I have like 5 whisks, so steeling myself against the coming pain of a sore wrist, I grabbed my nearest whisk and started working that cake mix together like no one’s business. Ten seconds later, my wrist hurt so much that I wanted to cry, but my mixture was lumpy and very unappealing-looking, so I soldiered on and eventually got the mixture as lump-free as possible. Note to self: get an electric mixer.

I grabbed one of my glass 13 x 9 baking pans and promptly poured the contents of the bowl into the baking pan. As I was scraping the last few drizzles out of the bowl, I realized I had forgotten to grease the bottom of the baking dish – shoot! Now I was faced with the choice of dumping the batter back into the bowl, cleaning out the baking dish, and either drying the baking dish by hand and then greasing it, or leaving it to dry in my drying rack while greasing my other baking dish and pouring the batter into that one. I decided to leave the batter where it was and worry about all the unnecessary cleanup for after I had some crumb cake. I figured it’s a glass baking dish, the cleanup won’t be as awful as if I’d used a metal one. Note to self: don’t get flustered trying to take pictures for your blog posts when baking so that you miss crucial steps that will save you trouble later.

I should clarify that yes, I do have two 13 x 9 glass baking pans and no electric mixer. Hey, someday I might need to make two pans of lasagna at once, right?

Moving along, the cake went into the oven and I started on making the crumbs. This required melting two whole sticks of butter, which I decided to do on my stove because I feel like butter splatters way too much whenever I’ve melted it in the microwave and results in lots of extra cleanup. So I put the two whole sticks on the lowest setting and let them melt away while I measured out and combined the other crumb ingredients in a separate bowl.

mmmm... feel that heart attack building now

After I poured the butter into the other crumb ingredients, I was met with the conundrum of what utensil to use to mix the ingredients together, and settled on a fork. I think it worked pretty well.

By this time, the cake was still a good 10 minutes away from being crumb-ready, so I set the crumbs aside and did a little bit of cleanup. One of my mom’s cardinal rules of the kitchen was that we always clean up as we go along, a lesson that has served me quite well in the many years since I first learned it. When my timer went off, I noticed that the butter had separated a little bit from the rest of the crumb ingredients, so I gave them another quick mix before I pulled the cake out. The cake was not quite set and just starting to get golden on top, so my timing was on and I started crumbing the top of the cake. This process took longer than I thought it would, but eventually I got the whole cake covered and placed it back into the oven to finish off. When the timer went off again to signal the end of the baking, I took a look at the cake and it appeared as though the crumbs were still a little too moist, so I left the cake in for a few additional minutes.

After I pulled it out of the oven for good, I let the crumb cake rest for about 10 minutes before carving it up into big squares. I couldn’t resist a piece, so I had it as dessert. And since the powdered sugar was not listed with the other ingredients for the recipe, I neglected to pick it up at the grocery store. So the cake is without powdered sugar, but it's probably a blessing since trying to sprinkle it on top of the cake would have made a huge mess I'm sure.

So, that’s how it all went down on Saturday. I am bringing in some of the crumb cake to work for my coworkers and will post in a few days what their and my reactions were.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon