Grandma’s Sand Cake Recipe

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this lately. Maybe because I haven’t made it for a while. Sand Cake is a traditional Danish (Sandkage) coffee cake, apparently very common in Denmark when my father’s family emigrated, and is named for its golden appearance not dryness. It’s likely still common, at least for traditional occasions, as recipes for it are easy to find. When I was a child in the 1970s, Grandma always had some ready when we visited, along with other baked goods for her grandchildren.

I have a handwritten transcription of my mother’s version, slightly modified to suit her dietary requirements from that given to her by her mother-in-law, that was passed to me before the birth of my oldest child. It’s probably the first time she gave me the recipe, but I know I had her sent it to me by email once or twice, too. I’ve adjusted back to the original, but the only difference is that my mother made it with margarine instead of butter, and using diet margarine in later years. I have made it successfully with both butter and vegan margarine. For someone with as low a number of taste buds as I seem to have, the taste isn’t very different, but I strongly suspect my grandmother would only have used butter.

It’s a fairly simple coffee cake and surprisingly easy to get right, though the baseline recipe is definitely not for Vegans.

Ingredients and instructions, as originally received with margarine swapped back out for butter:

2 cups of flour
1/2 pound of butter
1 1/4 cups of sugar
4 eggs
2 tbsps. lemon juice
2 tspn. of vanilla

1) Grease and flour a loaf pan.

2) Cream margarine and sugar.

3) Add eggs and vanilla, then lemon juice.

4) Beat in flour until smooth and pour into loaf pan.

5) Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes at 325F (depending on pan depth).

6) Test with a toothpick and if it comes out clean it’s done. If not, bake a few more minutes.

Note from my mother: you can also take 1/4 to 1/3 of the batter and mix about a tablespoon of cocoa into it. Put the remaining batter in the pan and swirl in the chocolate batter with a knife. It gives a nice marbling effect for a change. [I think this is her twist on things as I don’t remember my grandmother doing this. I also have the feeling that the batter needs to come out more fluid than mine typically does in order to accomplish this, but I don’t seem to have the foresight to use room-temperature butter, so that’s likely why.]

My notes: baking reduces to 40-45 minutes at the same temperature in mini-loaf pans. Sprinkle icing sugar on top. Serve warm or not as your choice, but the smaller the loaf the sooner it should be eaten. My preference would be to rounding units into SI since these mentally make more sense to me, but somehow, two and a half decades into the 21^st century in Canada we’re still using imperial measurements for baking.

I have successfully made a vegan version using vegan margarine and later plant-based butter. The best vegan egg substitute to use is an actual vegan “egg” product. One of the “you can swap this in for egg-less baking” substitutions doesn’t produce quite the same consistency.

And since I haven’t made it for a while, maybe now is the time.

Be well, everyone.