What Makes Tennessee Stack Cake A Unique Southern Classic

One of the best things about any big country is all the regional recipes that provide unique windows into the local culture, and Tennessee stack cake is a classic example. Some of the unique regional cakes of the United States are based around specific flavors, like the hummingbird cakes that mashes up Southern-favorite flavors banana, pecan, and pineapple. Stack cake on the other hand combines several unique features, mostly around how it is prepped. It's an apple cake that gets baked in hard layers that end up softening as the cake is left to sit.

Also called the Tennessee Mountain Cake, stack cake isn't an exclusive treat of the Volunteer State, it's a favorite of the wider Appalachian region, but Tennessee has laid the most claim to it. Coming out of the preservation culture of the region, stack cake uses a lot of simple pantry staples, and gets its flavor from a wet filling made from apples, spices, and molasses. Extending from the preservation angle, the apples must specifically be dried apple slices, not fresh. The most unusual aspect is the "cake" part of the recipe itself. Rather than being made from the batter used in most types of cakes, the layers in Tennessee stack cake are made from a dough that gets rolled out like a cookie. The cake layers are baked outside of a pan too, producing slightly irregular disks that lend the dessert a rustic look. And when you assemble the stack cake, the layers are hard and brittle.

The key to Tennessee stack cake is the resting period that follows the construction. The dried apples get turned into a wet filling by being reconstituted with water, sugar, and spices. Being a regional recipe there are lots of variations, and some also add molasses to the apple mixture, while others only use the molasses in the cake dough. The apple filling gets spread generously between six layers of the hard cake, as the filling's moisture is essential to softening it. The constructed cake is then wrapped in plastic wrap, and let to sit in the fridge overnight at the minimum, and up to 48 hours is ideal. During this time the cake will rehydrate and the filling seeps into it, binding everything together to form a tender, homogenous dessert.

Between the long resting period, the baking of individual layers, and cooking a filling from dried apples, making a Tennessee stack cake is definitely a project. However each step in the process is important for producing the unique melding together of the ingredients that gives the cake its signature taste and texture. Like other classic, old-school Southern desserts, stack cake is an example of how the challenge of acquiring fresh food in the past ended up pushing people to make creative choices that produced unique recipes. Even if we don't have the same scarcity today, the Tennessee stack cake is itself something worth preserving.