Posted on 11/07/2015 12:04:34 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
CRISFIELD, Md.—Can you have your cake and island too?
The folks on Maryland’s Smith Island, tucked offshore in the Chesapeake Bay, have tried mightily to save their dwindling archipelago with a distinctive eight-to-twelve layer cake.
The cakes have done great. The island, less so.
Smith Islanders have long baked a cake called the Smith Island Cake, with up to a dozen pencil-thin layers of cake and frosting. And for nearly as long, the island’s economy and population have slumped—to 169 citizens at last estimate.
So in 2008, state lawmakers hit on a solution: Make the cake the state dessert.
On the one hand, the sweet stimulus has been a smash success, with the Smith Island Baking Co. selling nearly 70,000 cakes last year and racking up close to $2 million in sales.
On the other hand, “what kind of idiot starts a bakery in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay?†said Brian Murphy, owner of the company, over lunch recently as a hurricane, currently smacking the Bahamas, posed another threat to his daily delivery plans.
Women used to bake the cakes out of their kitchens and sell them to visitors. The thin layers are supposed to make the cakes especially beautiful, rich and moist.
Several efforts to launch a significant cake operation on the island had foundered until 2009. That’s when Mr. Murphy, a recent M.B.A. graduate from the University of Pennsylvania who had grown up in Easton on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, approached a group of island women—offering to handle the logistics and business operations of a company if they baked the cakes.
But the cake company’s success can’t overcome the island’s quirks.
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What about the Lady Baltimore Cake ???
I thought that was the ND cake ???
Whoops..MD cake...
169 people on an island that is sometimes inaccessible. Sign me up. My neck of the woods has been “found” so it’s not so nice and peaceful these days.
Hmm, the cake recipe in the comments sounds a bit off. Four cups of milk and one boxed yellow cake mix?
bfl
More accurately, it is piles of icing interrupted by thin slivers of cake.
If I recall correctly, linguists have studied the dialect and speech patterns of people from Smith Island. They speak a distinct dialect there. But that may be changing as that island is not so isolated anymore.
>> linguists have studied the dialect and speech patterns of people from Smith Island. They speak a distinct dialect there. But that may be changing as that island is not so isolated anymore <<
Indeed, although I think the forces of modernization may already have demoted the islanders’ speech pattern from a “dialect” to a mere “accent.”
The same situation holds for Virginia’s nearby Tangier Island, where the quaint local accent is almost the same as on Smith Island. Both patterns will probably be virtually extinct within 20 or 30 years. Sad for us lovers of language!
My uncle landscaped Michner’s house on the Eastern Shore, took him 4 years to get the cheap bastard to pay up.
Maryland designated Smith Island cake as the official state dessert in 2008.
The best cakes to come out of Maryland are those made from crab.
Maryland Smith Island Cake State PING!
Funny thing...I’ve nver heard of this cake until I read this article. Then, in today’s mail, a catalog arrived that offered Smith Island Cake, among other delecacies, by mail in 2 flavors! It costs $50. I don’t remember if shipping is included in that price.
I’ve tried the Smith Island cake, and I can’t say I’m impressed.
Apparently, Lady Baltimore cake doesn’t come from Maryland but from the Lady Baltimore Tea Room, which was in Charleston in the early 1900s.
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