FOOD NEWS
Old-School Desserts People In The '70s Loved To Eat
By Jay Wilson
The cake first came to prominence in February 1978, when North Carolina-based Mrs. L.H. Wiggins submitted the recipe for it to Southern Living magazine.
Hummingbird Cake
The cake starts out like a banana cake, with browning chopped bananas mixed with flour, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, baking soda, and chopped nuts, but then calls for chopped pineapples.
It's believed that the baked Alaska was first created back in the 1860s, but it's quintessentially a '70s dessert that is really emblematic of the decade.
Baked Alaska
The cake relies on its hair-raising ability to cook on its outside, generating a bronzed, crispy meringue exterior, while keeping the ice cream inside chilled and solid.
An undeniably retro affair, Jell-O cookies harnessed the power of Jell-O, a staple of recipes during the decade. The Jell-O's gelatin made cookies squishy and moist.
Jell-O Cookies
In these cookies the Jell-O sat alongside flour, butter, and sugar in the cookie batter, adding a sweet, tart flavor, and dyeing each cookie a fairly lurid color.
The longer name of this cake is "Better Than Robert Redford" cake, or "Better Than Sex" cake, and it was designed to be the ultimate in appeal and desire.
Robert Redford Cake
It's commonly made by pouring sweetened condensed milk over a premade chocolate cake, and then scooping on caramel ice cream. It's then set in the fridge topped with whipped cream.
The Watergate cake got its name in 1972, shortly after the Watergate scandal, because it had a bunch of nuts, under a distracting layer of bright, pleasing icing.
Watergate Cake
The cake is made with a yellow or white cake mix combined with pistachio pudding, which is covered in chopped pecans and coconut flakes. It has existed since the 1950s.