A showstopping holiday cake

Maryland's state cake will impress any guest...all eight layers of it!

Today for your holiday recipe I want to tell you a story from the state I live in, Maryland. There’s a small island called Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay between the coastal waters of Maryland and Virginia. It’s amazingly the last inhabited island in Maryland that can’t be accessed by car…residents need to take a boat to get there and back. Smith Islanders have a deep relationship with the sea, and a long history of fishing and oystering.

Back in the day, the island’s men would go off to sea for a week at a time, and their wives would pack them food for their journeys. One of the things they packed was a cake with many layers—we’re talking somewhere between 8 and 13! The idea was to pack each slice of this cake with as many dense calories as possible, to provide energy for the fishermen.

But people…electricity only reached Smith Island in the 1950s, so traditionally, this cake and its layers weren’t actually baked in an oven. They were cooked over a hearth, so shorter layers meant that each layer could bake fully. Each pan would be filled just a bit, a half an inch or so, and put on the top of the hearth to bake, then it would be cooled and layered with delicious chocolate frosting with all of the other layers. Talk about rich!

It’s so important to Marylanders that in 2008, it was named the official state cake of Maryland! We had it on the menu at America Eats Tavern, one of my restaurants where we celebrated American history. And we also actually served it recently at a lunch at the White House for a group of chefs of Heads of State, along with a scoop of crème fraîche ice cream. The dessert was made by the amazing White House pastry team with our recipe…doesn’t this look amazing?

This version for home cooks takes a little bit of a shortcut—instead of baking 8 short cakes, you are baking 4 slightly larger ones and splitting each of them in half horizontally. If you want to be more traditional about it, you can bake the 8 cakes separately—just do your best to smooth out each layer in the pan so it’s easier to build, and cut the baking time to 12-15 minutes per layer.

My friends—do you want to impress your guests for the holidays this year? And teach them just a little bit of history as well? This is the cake for you! It looks amazing and actually isn’t so hard to pull off…all you need is some patience. Set aside an afternoon, put on some holiday music (or Taylor Swift!!), and get baking!

Smith Island Cake

Makes 1 6-inch cake (Serves 8 to 10)

For the genoise cakes
4 large eggs
1/2 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
4 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt