Man, I had forgotten about those. They were a special treat when I was growing up, and birthdays did NOT rank as special. I remember walnuts.

I remember that loaf well. It was a favorite of our family also.

A & P brings back 1950’s memories, I and one of my BBF were part time A & P checkers working after school each night for an hour and half, Friday nights till 9pm and then 8 hrs on Saturdays. My lifetime fun job. Then I had to grow up.

Several years ago I went on a hunt for a Spanish Bar recipe and did find one I was happy with but Martha I will be making your recipe very very soon.

Thanks for this mornings walk down memory lane.

Shirl -- you'll have to tell me if this is better than the one you found. I, too, found many -- some with apple butter, a lot with cocoa and all with spices but I think this is the only one that added allspice. I settled on this one and believe me that first bite I was transported back in time! Now I'm wondering as flat as they were if they didn't bake them in 9 x 13, then cut them, ice between layers and make into bars? That actually would make more sense than making loaves!

They tore down the A and P when I was tiny, so I've never had this, but that looks like a good spice cake! I never liked the "lumps" in my spice cake, and would leave them out and put them in the filling instead, but I'm thinking the loaf shape might make the raisins better. I wish Grainlady were here to explain why (or if I'm imagining it), but a loaf or ring bakes through more evenly than a round or sheet and that might be why I have that feeling.

I can remember trips to the KC area to visit an aunt. She loved this bar and it was our job to go find it. If we were lucky, we'd get a morsel for our trouble ... she always wanted some left over so she could have it with her coffee.

I'm not familiar with the A&P cake, but that looks delicious! I love spice cake with raisins (and nuts) so will have to try this. You did a nice job with the combing-special tool or just talent with a fork?

My Mother and I were just talking about the Spanish Bar cake a couple of days ago, funny how this came up. I loved going to the A&P, my brother and I used to take turns grinding the coffee, I always loved the smell of that freshly ground coffee. Grandma would buy this cake occasionally, and I loved it. I've had trouble getting the frosting right, though, it wasn't really a traditional buttercream, it was firmer and very white, not buttery.

Annie

Lizbeth -- just a fork. But if you mess up, you can smooth out and try again!

Annie -- I should ask my DD. I thought the buttercream had the flavor of the one I remember (but it was a long long time ago since I've eaten it) but I know what you mean. I love Starbucks gingerbread but their icing (which supposedly is cream cheese) is a lot firmer than any cream cheese icing I've ever made. So I think there is something that commercial bakeries use to stabilize icing so it can be bagged and transported without getting frosting all over the cello wrapper. I also think that it was not made in a loaf and sliced. I think it was made in pans and layered and perhaps cut into loaves (after frosting the middle) before the top frosting was put on. Because of the packaging, I am sure it was made in a factory and not in the stores.

Interesting....looks yummy! The A and P in the town where I grew up left sometime in m y teen years and my mother seldom shopped there after we moved "up town". She didn't drive and the Acme was closer.
Notice....one always speaks of THE A and P....and THE Acme....but we don't say The whole Foods, or THE Hy Vee or THE Mageres....wonder why?

Oh, but here, in my part of the Midwest we do say "THE Walmart!"

I know Annie they make the combs but I don't have one so I just used a fork. When my DD returns from London next week, I will ask her about the frosting. Because I know that that Starbucks gingerbread IS NOT regular cream cheese frosting. Because you can peel it off. You couldn't do that with my cream cheese frosting! It's almost like a fondant but not that hard. Perhaps it's the result of fondant and cream cheese frosting having a baby?

Yes, that's the texture! Maybe they added the glycerin that people put in homemade fondant, or glycerin, or one of those frosting additives.

I remember the stuff just peeled off in pieces, for easy consumption, LOL, plus it made prettier slices. When I was a kid I thought it tasted good, now I'm just not sure, because I detest fondant but the grandkids love the stuff.

Annie

I've never seen or heard of this, although I think we had an A & P nearby when I was a kid. Can anyone say where the "Spanish" comes in to play?

Olychick -- two thoughts -- the raisins make it "Spanish" or it's named "Spanish" to make it seem exotic! I'm not sure what year it first appeared on A and P shelves, but the cake I made seems like an old and simple cake.

I think there also used to be an association of "Spanish" to spices. Or the guy who invented it was Spanish or Spanish speaking, and they kept calling it "Spanish" in the test kitchen and it stuck. :)

We always said "The A & P", like "the five and dime", which we would only do normaily for a type of store. The hardware store, the grocery store, the lumber yard. But never "the" before Safeway, Food Giant, etc. And I've never even heard "The A & P store" or "The Safeway store". I wonder if The A & P call themselves that?

My local Shop 'n Save still makes this cake and calls it a Spanish Loaf. Like yours, it is layered and iced with a cream cheese icing. My store only has icing between the layers and on the top. No fancy combing technique. BTW, I live in Western PA. Your recipe looks delicious and perfect for fall.

Do you have a recipe for the icing shown in the picture?

cream together softened cream cheese, powdered sugar and a splash of milk

Old thread, I know. If it’s cream cheese icing, you can use this.

8 ounces softened cream cheese

1/2 cup softened butter (prefer salted butter for flavor)

3 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1/8 tsp. salt

Nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, allspice, sign me up!

This cake looks easy and tasty. But as usual I am put off trying it because I'm too lazy to do the conversions. Any readers have a recipe with weights rather than cups? I'll take ounces if need be. 😉

Here is a nice recipe that’s written with weights, both imperial and metric.

Thank you. That looks tasty but it doesn't produce the Spanish bar cake!

I'm afraid I'm not in the market for recipes that take so much time and faff. Or which needs hours of steaming.

All recipes here are written using weights, so I don't lack for them. I just fancied trying this particular cake. I've searched for a UK version but it seems to be an entirely American phenomenon and every recipe I found was in cups.

I prefer metric units, too, but really if you’re truly interested in trying the recipe, a few seconds of googling equivalents should not be an obstacle. The only subjective ingredient is flour. Most packages of AP flour call a quarter cup serving equivalent to 30 grams but I find you really have to fluff the flour well and do a very gentle spoon and level for a cup to come to 120 grams. And then it ends up feeling light in most recipes. On the other end of the spectrum ATK calls a cup five ounces or 142 grams. This seems high to me so I only use this conversion for their recipes. I generally go with 130. which is right about what Kenji calls for in the linked Xiao Long Bao recipe.

I agree generally with what FOAS just said, but for cakes there's still more to consider because the way the flour bakes is also at issue. For first try at an older American recipe, a standard bleached white all purpose flour with about 10.5% protein is what most home bakers will use. But Southern recipes, and cake specialist recipes, might assume cake flour, also bleached, at about 7% protein. This is not the protein content on the nutrition label, which has too much rounding error to be useful for baking.

From what I've read, UK ”plain” flour is more like our pastry flour (which is 8-9% protein and often unbleached), and should be okay in place of specifically American ”cake flour” if you handle it gently. I also read that it is by law unbleached, whereas bleached flour here, which makes the old recipes work right, has to have replacement nutrients added. People complain bitterly that all of their American recipes for cakes, cookies, pies, etc, don't come out right in England! It's because of the flour. (Though your Canadian extra strong flour seems similar enough to our bread flour to work fine for bread, whereas breads people are used to making with AP will fail miserably with plain flour.)

Lots of people say plain flour is equivalent to our AP, but it's just not true! It may be used in the kitchen the same way, but it bakes differently, And same brand American AP bleached vs. unbleached handle differently as well. Just a bit, but makes a noticeable difference. Even King Arthur AP is different, being in the same range but generally 1% more protein. I don't like it for cakes. I use Gold Medal for bleached (or Central Milling ABC for unbleached). Best as I know, Pillsbury bleached AP is close to identical to Gold Medal.

It's not just cups vs grams. That's an easy enough conversion: Weigh your normal cup (The way you usually measure whether sifted, spooned, dip-leveled, etc.) of flour you bake with every time the weather changes for long enough to get hot, cold, middling, dry, damp, stormy. Great time of year for that now. Take the mean or median, or whichever number seems the most likely. But that's only useful with the same flour as your recipe.

A suggestion I saw for adapting American recipes is to combine plain and strong, or extra strong, flour. If the companies list the baking protein percentage on their bags or websites, as many do nowadays, you can try doing sums, but when you don't already know the recipes and how they should come out, it's hard to know. Easiest to wing it and see if you like what you get.

We don't say ”easy as cake”, like we do ”easy as pie”. If you can make a passable crust, pie is dead easy. We say ”piece of cake” as something easy, which implies somebody else made the cake, and gave you a piece.

Floral, I assume you know how to make a cake. Start with a regular cake recipe you like that makes approximately the same volume (pan size) and does't have extra wet ingredients. Compare the proprtions of flour, butter, eggs, sugar in each recipe to be confident that they're fairly similar, and use those weights with the flavors of this cake. You'll get a much better translation than trying to convert the measures,

Thank you for the long and detailed explanation. Sadly, I am an incorrigibly lazy cook and pure kitchen dilettante. I'm not going to risk wasting ingredients winging it and I'm not going to start doing maths and science just to get cake. I liked the look of this recipe precisely because it uses the really easy melting method, like parkin or gingerbread. No creaming, rubbing in or whipping. Looks as if I'm not going to try this one. I was just hoping someone might have a ready made recipe.

btw I don't own a measuring cup so I can't weigh it.

Perfectly understandable. Except I had to look up "parkin", which sounds good, but maybe too heavy for my climate.

Here's a super easy to follow conversion chart.

https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/cups-to-grams-conversion-charts/

Cake might be fine using all plain flour, or you could do half plain flour and half strong flour.

I don't know how to account for the unbleached, however. I found this explanation on Fresh Loaf, I think: "Cake flour in the US is usually chlorinated [bleached]. This alters the molecular structure of the flour, making it conducive to producing a cake with a higher volume and finer texture " The picture looks like a denser cake anyway, so this might not be an issue.

For weighing your own flour, one cup = 237 ml, so just under a quarter litre, if you have any kind of glass or cup that you know the volume is right. Maybe this wouldn't work for you, though, unless you sifted, because measuring flour is tricky. I bet if you don't have any kind of measuring cup, you don't have a sifter either, so go with the conversion on the chart. It should be close enough if you're just looking for nice cake, rather than a recreation of the original.

Interesting about the bleached, plllog, I never knew that. This article kind of agrees but kind of doesn’t:

Can You Use Bleached Flour and Unbleached Flour Interchangeably?

Bleached and unbleached flour can be used interchangeably. Some believe that bleached flour is better when you want your baked good to have a really bright white color, like when you make a white cake; or a lighter, fluffier texture, like when you want to make extra fluffy pancakes. But honestly, we are hard pressed to notice a difference when we use one versus the other. Yes: some with a very sensitive palate might be able to taste a difference, but in general we find there is no discernible difference in the volume, texture etc. of baked goods made with bleached versus unbleached flour.

Do Some Baked Goods Benefit from Bleached Flour vs Unbleached?

We would never choose to buy bleached flour over unbleached flour (or vice versa) for one particular baking recipe versus another, as we really do believe they are interchangeable. But the jury is not out on this! You will definitely find some who believe bleached versus unbleached really will make a difference in your baking when it comes to certain treats. Our suggestion? Give it a try and see for yourself. Buy a bag of bleached flour next time a white cake or pancake craving hits (or both) and see what you discover.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/packages/baking-guide/bleached-flour-vs-unbleached

(I think they meant the jury is STILL out on this!)

Well, sure. Some people don't notice anything. *I* have made cakes with unbleached flour, and They Are Not The Same. I think Food Network, in wanting to encourage their viewers to become makers, is right to downplay it. You can successfully make a cake without. You can make a good cake if the recipe isn't depending on bleached. King Arthur AP is *not* cake worthy, at least in my house. It comes out heavy and dense, same recipe, same pan, same oven. Unbleached with the right protein content comes out okay, but spongier and somewhat denser. GM AP is just right. I use Swansdown when cake flour is required, but it's too soft for my recipes that expect AP.

My point was that doing a straight conversion to European flour (and potentially butter, btw) isn't going to give you the same result.

For weighing your own flour, one cup = 237 ml, so just under a quarter litre,"

But you can't weigh in ml. That's a unit of volume not weight. European cooks use weight for solids and volume for liquids. Far more accurate than using volume for solids. Butter packs are marked in grams on the wrapper. You can just cut off the amount required. Squashing it into a cup just seems messy.

Yes, but if you want to know what a cup of flour weighs, you meausure out a volume (cup or 237ml) of properly transferred flour (not to compact it) and weigh the result and write down the weight, brand, type and, if it says, the baking percentage of protein, and save it where you can find it.

We use weights too, but a lot of our traditional recipes date back to when having any kind of quantification was rare, and a recipe (spelled ”receipt”) read like a shopping list....as if one might need a list for staples. Gramma would use a chipped teacup as a flour scoop, and differentiate a 2 cups flour cakelet from a three cups flour cake.

Agreed about weights being much more accurate, especially for flour. I have a lot of recipes I've written or tweaked which are part weight and part volume, but the bread recipes are almost entirely weight.

Our butter sticks are half cups and the wrappers are marked off in tablespoons.

Do check the compnversion table I linked. It's British, and has sections for each ingredient.

We had an A&P on Main Street and I vaguely remember this cake in the late 50s/early 60s. My advice is to use vanilla icing. I am sure that the spice cakes of that era had vanilla icing. I think cream cheese frosting may have been introduced with carrot cake in the late 60s/early 70s when carrot cake first became popular.

Maybe a Canadian can try it out for us.