Name: McKay Yancey
Class Year: 2010
Country of Residence: United States
Gooey butter cake is a special cake that my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri is known for around the country! My grandma (known fondly as Granny) has made this original for my birthday every year! Which is extra special because we share a birthday. I always look forward to my Granny making my great grandma’s Gooey Butter Cake.
Name: Patricia Simon
Class Year: 1968
Country of Residence: Germany
This cake was made by my mother Bunny Hutzler Simon ‘39 for all our birthdays. To this day it is requested as THE birthday cake, even by the granddaughter of her ’39 classmate! When I got married in 1971 this was the cake we wanted for our wedding. My mother complied but feared the cake would be not only extremely dense and moist but also too dark. So, she threw silver cake decorations all over it to make it less somber! This was in the day when the only beautifully decorated cakes came from the bakery if you were lucky enough to have a real master baker/confectioner. Needless to say, the dark chocolate color did not dampen the celebratory spirits one bit.
Name: Jacqueline den Hollander
Class Year: FF 1984
Country of Residence: Netherlands
A long time ago (I was barely a teenager), our family vacationed in the Dordogne, one of the most beautiful regions of France. And a heaven for food-lovers! Think foie gras, confit de canard, pommes à la sarladaise, truffels and more… One restaurant served a walnut-chocolate cake to die for. It took quite some persuasion but we succeeded in securing the recipe. What did the trick was the fact we too had some walnut trees on our property… Over the years, we have adapted it to our taste. Foremost by reducing the amount of sugar (and it is still very sweet…) and letting go of the chocolate topping (there is a limit to the amount of calories one wants to gobble on one serving…). But go right ahead and indulge if you feel like it!
Name: Mary Clare Leader
Class Year: 1980
Country of Residence: Lebanon
Serves 8-12. Takes approx. 1 hr.
Name: Deborah Wild
Class Year: 1997
Country of Residence: Tbilisi, Georgia (German, married to a Dane)
Christmas is a big deal in our house. Apart from MHC elfing tradition I used to play Christmas elf (or nisse as one would call it in Denmark) for my friends in College, I loved playing Krampus for the German club and shared the German tradition of advent with my friends.
When I met my Danish husband and he told me he was atheist, my reply was, him not believing in God was not an issue, but Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I’m afraid, were non-negotiable (both not traditions in his family).
Continue reading Dresdner Weihnachtsstollen (Christmas Stollen/Cake) (German)
Name: Emily Arnold
Class Year: 2012
Country of Residence: United States
My friend and I both enjoy cooking and we always have lofty ideas of cooking together but they rarely pan out. I found this recipe a couple days before her birthday (November 2019) and sent it to her to which she agreed it looked delicious. End of story right? Well no because I really wanted to try it but I didn’t need to eat a whole cake by myself. So for her birthday I bought her a bottle of limoncello. She labelled said bottle “Don’t Drink” so her husband wouldn’t drink it.
Name: Aniela White Staszewska
Class Year: 2005
Country of Residence: Bialystok, Poland
In Poland, apples have been grown since the seventh century, and since then they have become a core component of its cuisine. Today, Poland is one of the largest exporters of apples in the world. There’s even a children’s rhyme written by Jan Brzechwa (1898 – 1966) entitled Entliczek-Pentliczek, which tells a story of a little worm living inside an apple who goes to the city to find something else to eat, but when the waiter hands him a menu, there are only apple-based foods like szarlotka, stewed apples, and baked apples!
Name: Mieke Kamps
Class Year: 1978
Country of Residence: the Netherlands
My former neighbor Alletta used to make this delicious pie for birthdays. She gave me her recipe and I continued to make it for the Dutch Alpe d’HuZes beat-cancer-cycling-training of some women friends of mine. In order to raise money for cancer research every year some 5000 Dutch people go to the French Alpe-d’Huez mountain to cycle it up and down once, twice, three, four, five or ultimately six times in one day! The Dutch word for six is “zes” hence they call the event ‘Alpe d’HuZes’, in short ‘AD6’. Since the start of the Alpe d’HuZes-event in 2005 the Dutch cancer society; KWF has received some 10-12 million euros every year from Alpe d’HuZes!!! So, go for it!
Name: Corinne Morgan
Class Year: 2013
Country of Residence: United Kingdom
This is a recipe that was created by my great great grandmother and has been passed down through my mother’s side of the family, which has not had a son in 5 generations, so this recipe has always passed from mother to daughter. I made this recipe for a recent board gathering for the Mount Holyoke Club of Britain, where it was very popular. Upon telling my mother and grandmother about the great reaction to the recipe, they laughed and admitted to it also being their go to recipe whenever they needed to bring a food item to a gathering. Hopefully, this recipe can one day become your family’s old reliable as well.
Name: Silvia Maulini*
Class Year: 1980
Country of Residence: The Netherlands
* Silvia is one of this competition’s judges, so this recipe will not be considered – it’s simply delicious, and needs to be shared!
I have always found most (American) cheesecake recipes rather daunting and alarmingly rich in fats and cream. A few years ago, my daughters and granddaughters gave me a wonderful new cookbook by Cees Holtkamp, whose patisserie in the center of Amsterdam is a true monument to high quality pastries and cakes. His simple, not exceedingly fat and apparently foolproof recipe for cheesecake immediately caught my attention. It seemed too easy to be true, but Cees’ cheesecake turned out to be amazing and it has now become a classic at our family birthday celebrations. This is the cake that has been requested by all family members for our first physical gathering after the lockdown period: I can’t wait to bake a few of them!
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