Desserts
Vermont Chocolate Potato Cake
Potatoes may seem like an unlikely ingredient for a cake, but stick with me, here. You’re going to love this moist cake, packed with spices and a light chocolate flavor. When I spotted this recipe in the pages of Yankee’s 1981 The Yankee Magazine Cookbook, my curiosity was piqued and I knew I wanted to […]
By Aimee Tucker|Mar 30 2014|
Coffee By Design | Portland, Maine
Photo Credit : Katherine KeenanYield:
Ingredients
Instructions
Hello, I found your post regarding the Chocolate Potato Cake and wanted to share our family story about this cake with you.
The recipe for this cake has been passed down in our family for six generations. My 3rd great grandmother Mary Lucinda Bratton Shipman used to make this cake. She taught her daughter Ina Josephine Shipman Jennings to make the cake. Ina was badly burned in December 1914 and was to ill to make the cake for Christmas, so she talked her daughter (my great grandmother) Sylvia Lee Jennings, who was 10 years old at the time, through the recipe from her sick bed. Ina died shortly after. Sylvia made the cake every year for Christmas in memory of her mother. The recipe was passed to my grandmother, Lois Erlene Hollingsworth, then to my mother and then on to me and my sisters. It is a family tradition to make the cake each year during the holidays and tell the story of Grandma Ina. “You Live as Long as You are Remembered.” -Russian Proverbs. I know that my ancestors will live long in our hearts as this year my five year old daughter will help me make the cake and hear the story for the first time.