Blackout Cake History
Blackout Cake
When I was growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York there wasn’t a time that my mom or my dad wouldn’t purchase something from the Ebinger Bakery Shop in our neighborhood from fresh baked bread to delicious pastries and cakes. Ebinger’s was a German Baking Company which began operation in 1898 on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and soon grew in popularity. They made many different creations which people just had to have. One of them was their fabulous Blackout cake which was a chocolate layer cake which you just couldn’t get enough of. No one ever discovered the true secret ingredients but this cake has been duplicated and perfected and a replica of it can be bought from Zabar’s. Here is a recipe for a similar Blackout Cake so
perhaps you might like to try to make it at home.
As far as anyone knows the name of the cake came about during WW II when blackout drills were performed in homes in Brooklyn, so as to avoid silhouetting battleships that were leaving from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Even though their baked goods were popular Ebinger’s went bankrupt in 1972. This happened because companies like Entenmann’s had started to mass produce baked goods and Ebinger’s products like their Blackout Cake was still handmade and had a shelf-life of 24 hours.
When I was growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York there wasn’t a time that my mom or my dad wouldn’t purchase something from the Ebinger Bakery Shop in our neighborhood from fresh baked bread to delicious pastries and cakes. Ebinger’s was a German Baking Company which began operation in 1898 on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and soon grew in popularity. They made many different creations which people just had to have. One of them was their fabulous Blackout cake which was a chocolate layer cake which you just couldn’t get enough of. No one ever discovered the true secret ingredients but this cake has been duplicated and perfected and a replica of it can be bought from Zabar’s. Here is a recipe for a similar Blackout Cake so
perhaps you might like to try to make it at home.
As far as anyone knows the name of the cake came about during WW II when blackout drills were performed in homes in Brooklyn, so as to avoid silhouetting battleships that were leaving from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Even though their baked goods were popular Ebinger’s went bankrupt in 1972. This happened because companies like Entenmann’s had started to mass produce baked goods and Ebinger’s products like their Blackout Cake was still handmade and had a shelf-life of 24 hours.