Mamaw’s 1-2-3-4 Cake Was Lost for Decades—Until a Haunted House Brought It Back

“So your family lived in that haunted house?” my son asks while we bake a cake new to me, though it’s been in my family for at least four generations.

“A long time ago,” I say. By the time I was born, I explain, my direct family line had moved away from an internet-famous haunted house in Alabama, making a home on the Gulf Coast.

We talk about how family recipes and the regional flavors they feature can be our only lasting connections to our history, especially since I’ve raised my kids 3,000 miles away from the Florida Panhandle, where I grew up. And we marvel at how this particular recipe–my grandmother’s 1-2-3-4 Cake and Boiled Frosting–reached us through that very haunted house.

I grew up with a huge, supportive family in the Gulf South. On holidays and weekly visits to my grandmother’s house, my dad, uncles, cousins, and Mamaw prepared meals and dined together, sharing stories and family lore. Luckily, Mamaw had begun teaching me to cook when I was a teenager, and I wrote down some of her recipes. I didn’t think to ask her about many of my favorite dishes, like her fried cornbread, collards, or seafood soups. At the time, I didn’t realize how precious those moments were.

By the time I was in my mid-20s and my children were old enough to truly engage in the recipes I grew up loving, I had already lost Mamaw, my father, three aunts, two uncles, and a cousin.

As a solo mother of three, I found myself trying to recreate traditions without a guide. It felt like starting over, but I yearned to share my background with my kids.

All that changed with a picture of the haunted Bradley House I found online. I’d heard stories of it being in my family, so on a whim, I contacted the person who posted it. It turned out he was one of my last living relatives, my second cousin Robert. He told me that my great-great-great-grandparents lived in the Bradley House and explained exactly how the generations moved from the middle of Alabama to the Gulf Coast. Cousin Robert grew up in the same neighborhood as my dad, so he shared more recent history, too, like family gatherings with relatives I’d never met.

Robert had been collecting photos, stories, and recipes from our ancestors for decades. We started trading photos of our family online. That’s when I asked him if he knew Mamaw’s secret recipes. He told me that her mother put sugar in collard greens and baked cornbread rounds in the oven. Then, he sent me a receipt Mamaw had submitted on behalf of her mother to a community recipe book for 1-2-3-4 Cake and Boiled Frosting.

I’d never heard the name before, but I remembered a cake from my youth that tasted like almonds with a marshmallow-y frosting; I wondered if that could be the cake. My oldest son’s sixteenth birthday was approaching, so we decided to make it together.

The memorable name, 1-2-3-4 Cake, makes it easy to remember the proportions of the first four ingredients: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups sifted flour, and 4 eggs. Most of Mamaw’s recipes had been passed to her orally, so my guess is that this cake had been moving through the generations by word of mouth. The written recipe reads the way Mamaw used to talk, using a range of temperatures (350 to 375 degrees F) and an approximate baking time. It felt like she was talking to us.

“Baking like this really makes you pay attention,” my son says, and I agree, especially when we whip the boiled frosting by hand until it is a consistency I haven’t experienced in more than 25 years.

We ice the cake and take our first bites. Memories from my childhood bloom. Coming together to cook and eat was the center of my family. I had sat on the kitchen counter, watching my parents and Mamaw cook for hours before we all sat down to eat. Those flavors bring it all back.

It’s unlikely we’ll be visiting the Bradley House any time soon. But it doesn’t really matter. This family connection isn’t about the house, really, but what the house brought to me–and to my kids. My son and I have promised to come together in the kitchen at least once a month to try out family recipes.

“When you’re putting together a recipe that so many women in your family mixed and poured and baked for generations,” I tell my son, “that kind of echo is the closest you can get to revisiting the past.” And that’s a haunting I believe in. 

Grandmother’s 1-2-3-4 Cake

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 3 cups flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon almond extract

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a loaf pan.
2. Combine butter and sugar in a large bowl and beat until light and creamy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition until thoroughly mixed. 
3. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and sift together.
4. Alternate mixing in sifted flour mixture and milk until batter is smooth. Mix in almond extract. Transfer batter to the prepared loaf pan.  
5. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes.

Cook’s Note: Alternatively, you can bake the cake in two greased layer cake pans at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for about 25 minutes. Frost as desired, (By Bertie Bradley)

Boiled Frosting

Use with Grandmother’s 1-2-3-4 Cake

Ingredients

• 2 egg whites
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

1. Beat egg whites in a glass, metal, or ceramic bowl with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form. Set aside.
2. Combine sugar, corn syrup, and water in a saucepan and bring to boil over medium-high heat, stirring only until sugar is dissolved. Continue boiling rapidly at about 238 to 240 degrees F (114 to 115 degrees C) until a few drops of cold water dropped into the syrup form a soft ball.
3. Pour hot syrup in a fine stream over the egg whites, beating constantly. Add vanilla and continue beating until frosting has cooled and is of spreading consistency, 10 to 15 minutes. As frosting becomes too stiff for the beater, use a flat wooden spoon. 
4. To speed up the process, set the bowl over a pan of boiling water to hasten thickening.

Recipe from Bertie Bradley (submitted by Helen Baisden).