Roll out the welcome wagon. Stop on by and say hello to  A Cake Bakes in Brooklyn, which was started by an OTBKB reader and friend. I’m so glad she’s decided to start a blog! And it’s a tasty one. Already she’s posted many recipes for cakes that look delicious! Welcome to the block ACBB and good blogging to you.

Here’s an excerpt froma post called Beginning:

For years, I’ve been fascinated with home cooking, especially baking, in the first half of the 20th century, the time right before “convenience” foods became commonplace.

I have a collection of cookbooks from back then, with titles like Bettina’s Best Salads and What to Serve with Them (by the same authors that brought us A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband) published in 1923, and When Mother Let Us Cook, a 1919 book with the explanatory subtitle: A book of simple receipts for little folk with important cooking rules in rhyme together.

But even more compelling than these beautifully illustrated books, are the hinged metal recipe boxes and scrapbooks filled with carefully typed or handwritten recipes that I’ve collected through the years, mostly purchased for a dollar or two at estate sales or yard sales. These recipes are the real treasures, and probably more accurately reflect what people cooked and ate back then. I love the names of the recipes — moonlight chocolate cake, lovelight lemon cake, and the annotations on the recipes themselves — DOUGHNUTS: Aunt Becky’s From Mothers Recipe, or the word “good” written boldly at the bottom of a recipe for fudge.