Louisiana Ring Cake, Jean McLane

In November of 2024, a reader approached me when I was selling books at the Downtown Farmers’ Market. She told me of her mother’s wonderful recipe scrapbook. “She had multiple recipes for Louisiana Ring.” I didn’t tell her that I had no idea what that was. “One recipe is the good one and she put a star beside it.” I imagined some type of aspic. I didn’t figure it for a Maryland recipe for obvious reasons.

Until one hour later. A stranger came up and chatted me up about beaten biscuits. She used to get them at Graul’s, she told me. “They also used to sell this cake,” she went on, “called a Louisiana Ring.”

I do a good amount of public talks and I peddle books at various Farmers’ Markets and holiday marts. I talk to a LOT of people. And yet somehow, in years of doing these things, no one has mentioned this cake, until suddenly it comes up twice in one hour.

As soon as I got home, I searched my database. Sure enough, I had four recipes for the cake. One recipe appeared in the excellent BGE “Maryland Classics” cookbook. A recipe in volume two of “Dining Down Memory Lane” by Shelley Howell is specifically associated with the beloved Rice’s Bakery. Another of my recipes was handwritten into blank space in a community cookbook. Clearly, this was a sought-after cake.

Forty years before my encounter, Rose Davis was seeking. In February of 1983, she wrote to a nationally syndicated recipe exchange newspaper column and said that she’d had “fond memories of a cake she used to buy from Rice’s Bakery about 30 years ago. It was an orange-flavored pound cake with a crunchy coating, called ‘Louisiana Ring Cake.'” Could anyone find the recipe?

One year later, she received a reply. “C.R.” from Miami wrote “I am from New Orleans and have never heard of Louisiana Ring Cake… however, this may be what she wanted. This is a traditional Mardi Gras cake.” It was a reasonable assumption. But an incorrect one.

Finally, in March 1984, Mrs. Anthony Donnell of Claymont Delaware sent in a recipe containing orange and almond extracts, and a crunchy topping. “This looks like the real thing,” wrote Nancy Coale Zippe, the column’s author. Request solved; discussion ended.

Except in Baltimore.

The memory of the Louisiana Ring Cakes, delivered directly to customers from Rice’s Bakery trucks, never faded. In 1986, Evening Sun columnist Gilbert Sandler described a typical delivery from Rice’s to his household: “a dozen Parkerhouse rolls, a cherry pie — and a Louisiana Ring Cake.”

Sandler interviewed a retired manager of the bakery, Emory Rice Jr., who regaled with the story of how the bakery originally made deliveries by horse and wagon. “Each of our drivers was ally with each housewife,” he said. “He’d tell her our specials, she’d tell him what… she had in mind that day. The big favorite, year after year after year, was Rice’s Louisiana ring cake.”

Sandler commented that the original recipe for the cake seemed to be lost. The bakery closed in 1974; the towering Rice’s sign over Orleans Street was gone.

One reader, Pat D’Amario, took issue with the statement that the recipe was lost. “I can assure you,” she wrote to Sandler, “that the original recipe for Rice’s Louisiana ring cake is alive and well. My father Eugene Buchler created it.” When asked to share the recipe, she smugly replied, “No, that stays in our family.”

Curtis Rice and his son Duane founded Rice’s Bakery just before the Civil War. Both appear in Baltimore’s 1870 census as bakers. An 1882 ad listed three locations for “Rice’s Vienna Bakery” and advertised Vienna Bread for Christmas Morning.

Unlike many of Baltimore’s other famous bakers, the Rices didn’t hail from Germany. For whatever reason, the family came to Baltimore from Vermont, where their family roots went back for many generations.

Eugene Buchler, according to his 1987 obituary, was from Germany, however. He immigrated to Baltimore in the 1940s.

Buchler may have developed a recipe for the cake for his employer, but Louisiana Ring Cake already existed elsewhere by that time. A bakery in Massachusetts advertised the cake in 1937 as “the cake that everybody knows and likes.”

An advertisement for “Big Chain Stores” in the Shreveport Louisiana Times in 1939 described an “extra rich pound cake with ground orange and coconut in the batter.”

Meanwhile, in Indiana, Freihofer’s Bakery in Indianapolis described their Louisiana Ring as “a rich golden ring, flavored only with fresh orange fruit and tender crushed macaroons baked into the top and sides of the cake, covered over with powdered sugar.”

Today, different recipes persist for these variations, sometimes under the name “Louisiana Crunch Cake.” The only apparent tie to Louisiana, Big Chain aside, seems to be the similarity of the cake’s shape to that of a King Cake.

Thanks to Rice’s, Louisiana Ring Cake became a mainstay in the Baltimore area. The recipes printed in Baltimore newspapers and local community cookbooks are all similar.

I made the cake several times, first attempting to use the recipe hand-written into my copy of “The Best in Cooking in Orangeville,” a 1960 Baltimore neighborhood cookbook. That recipe was copied down wrong and missing several ingredients. Most other recipes entail reserving a part of the batter to mix with additional sugar and flavoring and pouring this into the ring pan to make the crust. This works well. The best method I found, however, formed the crunchy crust from some of the mixed dough before adding the eggs and milk. This version of the recipe was shared by Bel Air Branch librarian Jean McLane in the Bel Air Aegis newspaper in 1983. Thank you Jean!

As for the flavor of the cake, Louisiana Ring needs no initiation. At the first bite, there’s something instantly familiar. A hint of orange and almond extract is just enough to suggest a wider world of flavor. Some old ads from outside Maryland mention coconut, and some of my family members who ate the cake tasted coconut. The crunchy top seems almost like a happy accident – the crisp edges of a pound cake amplified into the star of the show. As I passed through my kitchen, the crust invited picking and snacking – even though I knew I would rue myself later when I cut a slice from where I’d already chipped away the best part. It was the crunchy crust that made Louisiana Ring Cake the star of the Rice’s Bakery offerings, a compulsory add-on along with the loaves of bread that they pioneered selling to Baltimoreans in pre-sliced form.

This cake came out best when made in a flat-topped pan instead of a molded bundt-style pan. I used my angel food cake pan for my most successful version. I added some holiday sprinkles and brought a cake to a parade day party. It goes fantastically with hot coffee or tea.

I don’t like to beat the “food brings people together” trope into the ground too hard, but Louisiana Ring Cake is a recipe that brought people together via newspaper columns, brought housewives together with their community bakers, and brought me together with readers this fall. I hope that by sharing the recipe here, it can continue to do so, or at least awaken memories of a bakery truck coming up the road with the week’s bread and some special treats.

Recipe:

• 2.75 Cups flour
• 2 Teaspoons baking powder
• .5 Teaspoon salt
• 1.75 Cups sugar
• 1 Cup butter
• .75 Cup milk
• 1 Teaspoon orange extract
• .25 Teaspoon almond extract
• 3 eggs

Topping:

• 4 Teaspoons flour
• 2 Tablespoons powdered sugar
• 2 Tablespoons brown sugar
• .5 Teaspoon orange extract

Sift flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar together. Cut in butter. Reserve 1/2 cup of this crumb mix for topping and set aside. Add milk, extracts, and eggs to batter and beat at medium speed for 4 minutes. Next add reserved crumb mix to topping ingredients. Sprinkle topping on bottom of well-greased 9″ tube pan. Pour batter on top. Bake at 350°F for 50 to 60 minutes till done. Remove from pan immediately.

(Note: I added red and green sprinkles for Christmas, seen in the photos)

Recipe from the Bel Air Aegis, July 7, 1983, shared by Jean McLean