The unusual techniques that make this retro cake “forgotten”, easy and delicious

Every Sunday, I cook a cake to eat throughout the week. He lives on our kitchen counter, ready for me, my family and unexpected guests to snack. Usually, the well cooked is a gross cake like banana bread or a coffee cake. Recently, however, I whipped a lazy Marguerite cake, which consists of a sponge cake garnished with a mixture of melted butter, brown sugar and sweet grated coconut.

The cake of Marguerite Labers is a retro dessert that dates back to the 1930s. I met it for the first time several years ago in the 1942 book General Mills Betty Crocker Cook all use pastrieswhere he was entitled “Cake of the day of attendance”. The book notes that it is also “called lazy Marguerite cake or emergency cake”, which made me laugh.

The version of Betty Crocker calls to sift the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder in a bowl, then beating in shortening, milk, egg and “aroma”. Once the cake is cooked, the recipe asks the readers to garnish with a “grilled frosting” of melted butter, brown sugar, cream and chopped nuts or grated coconut. Curious to know more about this cake, I searched on the internet and immersed in old numbers of various newspapers, and I learned that the cake was quite popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the Betty Crocker book version, which was made by butter and sugar in creation, many recipes for lazy marguerite cakes have used a hot milk cake, which is made by hot milk and melted in whip eggs.

In the January 9, 1939 edition of Tulsa TribuneThe writer Betty Sneed called the cake one of his favorites. “On the days when there is no dessert in the house and you don’t have much time, this recipe will just fill Dandy because it cannot be mixed in a few minutes that,” she notes, adding that there is no need to worry about the creation of ingredients and not waiting for the cake to cool it. “If you have not already trained the habit of lazy Marguerite on lazy days, here is your chance.” The rendering of the sneed cake uses a hot milk cake as a base and calls for the cake immediately after spreading the coconut frosting – no grill is required.

As is the case with many beloved recipes, there are many riffs on the lazy Marguerite cake. Some people are in the towel by creating the butter and the sugar together before adding the eggs and the dry ingredients, and some people throw all the cake ingredients in a bowl and whisk until a paste forms. The most common version of the cake, however, is a hot milk cake which is covered with the coconut mixture once baked in the oven, then toasted until the filling is golden brown. It is remarkably similar to the popular Danish Drømmekage (“Dream Cake” in Danish). It is not known if the two are linked, but I would bet they are.

In my recipe below, I use a hot milk cake as a base. It’s extremely simple to do and almost impossible to spoil: to do it, you simply whisk the whole eggs with sugar until they are pale, soft and doubled in volume, then pour a mixture of hot milk and butter, and finally add the dry ingredients and mix until you have a coherent dough.

It would not be a lazy daisy cake without the coconut trim, so I of course included it in my recipe, with the slight touch of browning the butter before whipping in the brown sugar, milk and salt, followed by the sweet grated coconut. The brown butter gives the garnish rich in hazelnut notes which complement the melasse flavor of the brown sugar, and a little salt helps to round it.

Many traditional lazy cakes from the Marguerite require cooking the cake, then garnish and toast it. In my tests, however, I found that cooking the garnish was a more reliable method than the grill, and led to a crunchy coconut crust which was uniformly golden – not burned – every time. Thus, instead of the spoonful on the coconut mixture on the cake at the very end, I thoroughly spread it on the cake halfway through cooking. While the cake continues to cook, caramelise coconut, becoming crisp and soft in a satisfactory way.

It is a wonderfully easy cake that only takes 10 minutes of active time to prepare. The cake is very wet and can be kept in an airtight container up to five days, but if your neighbors, friends and family love it as much as mine, something tells me that the cake will be gone in just a few hours.

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