The Vintage Cake Martha Stewart Always Ate For Her Childhood Birthdays

If you've never heard of Lady Baltimore Cake before, then chances are you aren't from the American South. This vintage Southern dessert is all about the dried fruit and nut filling surrounded in fluffy white frosting. Although one of the dessert's most famous fans — Martha Stewart — isn't from the South at all. She grew up in New Jersey, and stayed there until leaving to attend college in New York; when she bought her first house, it was in Connecticut. Yet, even for a Northeasterner, one taste of Lady Baltimore cake was enough to make a lifelong fan out of this celebrity foodie.

An Instagram post from Martha Stewart depicts a clip from an episode of Stewart's cooking show in which she is joined by her mother. Stewart waxes, "Growing up, mom never let a birthday go by without baking a cake. And for my birthday, the standard was Lady Baltimore cake. Right, mom?" (Her mother nods while sifting flour). It's perhaps no surprise that Lady Baltimore cake would be the future professional cook's pick for a ceremonious birthday cake. Visually, the multilayered dessert is a spectacle, dressed in peaks of cloud-like seven-minute frosting. In the video, Stewart calls the boiled frosting "the best part of the cake." The clip includes detailed directions for Stewart's personal Lady Baltimore birthday cake, prepared by the cook and her mom side-by-side in the kitchen. The Martha Stewart website has also published a recipe for Martha's go-to Lady Baltimore cake.

Despite the geographically-sounding "Baltimore" in its title, the cake actually takes its name from an eponymous 1961 romance novel by Owen Wister — an unexpected love story centered around a wedding cake baker, and set in South Carolina. Indeed, Lady Baltimore cake is a dessert worth falling in love over. Lady Baltimore's dried fruit filling is customarily cooked with honey and rum to soften and become sticky. In the video, Stewart and her mother use a mixture of dried figs and raisins, but in the recipe published on Stewart's website, the filling is made from walnuts, dates, golden raisins, and rum (no figs). Other traditional preparations use everything from candied cherries to pecans and almonds, so dealer's choice. "I remember loving to decorate all the cakes with you," Stewart tells her mom, as they spoon filling between the white cake layers. "Too bad it's not my birthday today! Beautiful!"

The treat delivers on unique, complex flavors and distinctive texture. Layers of airy white cake are packed with sticky, chewy filling, and the whole thing gets draped in rich, shiny boiled frosting made from sugar syrup. It's an involved, multi-step cake to make — the intense appreciation of which, as a child, perhaps heralded Stewart's future career in the culinary world. For more foodie fan inspiration, we've rounded up 15 more of Martha Stewart's favorite foods.