Vintage Recipe Roulette: Terrifying 1956 Bunny Cut-Up Cake

It had to happen eventually...my first utter vintage redo failure

When I started looking at vintage recipes for an Easter piece, it became clear pretty quickly that cake is the way to go. Sure, there are Jell-O salads like this absolute monster from Hellmann’s (diced veggies, mayo, vinegar, lime gelatin, and a transfer-related accident waiting to happen):

But for the most part, it’s a cavalcade of increasingly terrifying cakes:

It starts innocently enough, doesn’t it? Just a sweet layer cake with cute little jelly bean nests on top. And then, a slightly odd but still pretty cute pink bunny that would be really easy to construct. Next, a bunny with complicated, almost-certain-to-fall-apart assembly and eyelashes like cockroach antennae. Lastly, a blueprint for a ludicrously ornate collage of progressively more minuscule cake bits, reaching a terminal crescendo of facehugger alien baby, eyes lolling menacingly in search of prey, erupting out of a macabre, harlequin-studded cloning pod.

I guess it could be a chick coming out of an Easter egg, but that’s hardly any improvement.

Today, I’ve chosen the one in the header image, which I find most terrifying due to its simplicity. Evil is, after all, banal. The jaunty bow tie, a mocking nod toward plush toys of our childhoods. The eyes, beady and shark-like. The mouth, blood-red with the remains of its enemies. Here’s the similar version from a magazine ad:

It’s originally from a 1956 Baker’s Coconut recipe pamphlet entitled “Cut-Up Cakes” and formatted as a monthly calendar, with room to write important birthdays and such, alongside a pattern for cutting a cake into pieces to approximate some seasonal critter. There are also later 1960s and 1970s versions of the booklet like this one, and it’s interesting to see the aesthetic change over time. If you’re Gen X, you almost certainly had one at some party or other — my mom and I made this classic 70s bunny with a jellybean bow tie one Easter.

But, there’s just something about that uncanny, dead-eyed doll, 1950s look that really appeals to me, and the bunny cut-up cake (careful with your search engine phrasing — “cut-up bunny cake” is something VERY DIFFERENT) at the top is the coverguy for the original booklet. Let’s make it!

The recipe as printed in a magazine ad calls for a baked cake with the Baker’s Coconut Angel Flake Beat ‘n’ Eat Frosting, and of course any idiot will have that recipe on hand, right? Well, not me, but there are recipe clearinghouse websites out there that often preserve this kind of recipe, and the general consensus is that this is the right one. Here are the ingredients, plus the decoration bits:

You mix sugar, vanilla, cream of tartar, and an egg white, and then add boiling water to whip it to stiff peaks. I was worried it would give me candied scrambled egg white, but it worked perfectly. (Note: it’s just 1/4 c of boiling water, not enough to bring to a safe temp, so I used pasteurized egg white and will refrigerate the cake to store.)

This version is much less sticky than the marshmallow-like wartime Halloween cake I did. It spread more easily.

And on that note, the cut-up cakes don’t specify a cake recipe — you choose your own adventure. I considered leaning in to the aesthetic this bunny cake implies

and going with a morbid red or pink velvet, but someone in my household hates that kind, alas. I chose our favorite chocolate cake batter and made a 9x13 so we can use the extras for cake pops, and then used a 9x9 square for this cake, as instructed. Parchment paper lining the pan is your friend if you are going to make this cake — it’s very difficult to turn out and cut and rearrange without any wiggle room.

Here it is after turning on to the only platter I have that’s large enough for a cake that’s 16 inches long. I used a very long, serrated bread knife to transfer the ears, and everything is flipped upside down so that the top surface is smooth.

It looks like a bunny the Devil’s own child would draw in sharpie. This is going to be so awesome.

As for icing, this kind of frosting is great when you have a crummy crumby cake with cut edges, because it spreads very smoothly. If you try to just take one swipe, you’ll have fewer crumbs in your frosting. It’s sort of like a watercolor — if you overwork it, you get a muddy mess.

And that’s why I think coconut decorating was so common for household cook recipes last mid-century — it hides a plethora of icing mishaps!

Now to the decoration. It was at this point I started to become concerned. I’ve got unsweetened coconut (the sweetened stuff is too much for me), some of which is colored pink with a little food coloring, and some Brach’s spiced jelly beans. (I had fun tasting those; review here if you’re curious — they’re rather more interesting than I anticipated.)

Friends, I’ve let you down. It’s kind of cute.

I did my best, but it’s just not horrifying at all. Even if I had tracked down pink pipe cleaners instead of paper strips, I don’t think it would have helped. It might have been even cuter.

If you have traditional foods in fun shapes, I would looooove to hear about it below. I have great fun covering Natasha Contardi’s nonna’s Serpentone for Saint Anatolia’s Day and 1,300 year old Chinese funeral cookies for TODAY, and I would enjoy hearing more!

But as for this effort, I’m so ashamed. I’ll do better next post, I promise.

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