Blue Ribbon Chocolate Cake and Aunt Lois' Coconut Cake recall a past when layer cakes were staples in most American kitchens.

HOMEMADE layer cakes used to be stacked up on pedestal plates all over North America. They were on the sideboard at Aunt Millie's house, on the kitchen table at Grandma's house, and down the street at the Pfeiffers' house. They were practically part of the furniture.

My mom could whip one up without batting an eye; even now, in her 70s and fairly arthritic, she can put together a cake from scratch and have it cooled and halfway frosted before most people can read the instructions on a box of cake mix. But nowadays, homemade layer cakes seem to have gone the way of the spotted owl. If it weren't for birthdays and all the contingent nostalgia, we probably wouldn't have layer cakes at all.

I called Rose Levy Berenbaum, author of the best-selling "Cake Bible."

"Layer cakes aren't `in' anymore," she said. "No one wants to mess around with all that cooling and stacking.

"I don't even make layer cakes anymore," confessed the queen of cakes. "I tend to bake single layers like pineapple upside down cake and molded cakes - is that the right word? - you know, things like kugeloff and Bundt cakes."

One two-layer cake

This cake, which appeared in "In Season: Culinary Adventures of a San Juan Island Chef," takes its name from the fact that it took first prize at the San Juan County Fair. The trick that earned the ribbon may have been the fancy piped-on frosting, which was squeezed through the cut-off corner of a Ziploc bag. 2 1/2 ounces unsweetened chocolate 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened 2 cups brown sugar 2 eggs 2 1/4 cups flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/3 cups brewed coffee 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Chocolate frosting (recipe follows) 1. Have all ingredients at room temperature. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans, preferably pans with removable bottoms. 2. In a double-boiler, or a stainless-steel bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, melt chocolate and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, whisk butter with brown sugar until very smooth and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in melted chocolate. 3. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda and salt. Whisk about 3/4 cup of flour mixture into the butter mixture, then whisk in 1/2 cup of coffee. Add another 3/4 cup flour mixture and another 1/2 cup coffee, stirring well between each addition. Stir in remaining flour mixture, remaining coffee and vanilla extract. 4. Transfer batter to prepared cake pans. In an oven preheated to 350, bake 30 minutes or until cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center. Cool cake on racks before removing from pans. Place one cake round on a cake plate and cover with 1/3 of the frosting. Top with second cake layer. 5. Put half the remaining frosting into a self-sealing food storage bag and snip off about an inch from one corner. Pipe frosting onto sides of the cake in even, overlapping stripes to completely cover the sides. Refill the impromptu pastry bag with the remaining frosting and cover the entire surface of the cake with fanciful whirls to give the cake an impressive looking finish. Print friendly version.

About 3 cups

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter 4 1/2 ounces unsweetened chocolate 5 cups powdered sugar 1/2 cup plus 1 or 2 tablespoons coffee 1. In a double boiler, or a stainless-steel bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, melt butter and chocolate. 2. Measure 4 cups of powdered sugar into a large mixing bowl and stir in melted butter and chocolate. Stir in 1/2 cup coffee. Stir in remaining 1 cup powdered sugar and just enough coffee to make a smooth frosting. Pipe or spread onto cooled cake. Print friendly version. More recipes Aunt Lois' Coconut Cake Fluffy White Icing

I know, I know, I say; they're too big, too sweet, too messy. But Rose, I say, layer cakes are fantastic! All those other cakes aren't proper cakes at all. They don't even have frosting!

I thought maybe the folks at King Arthur Flour Co. could reassure me. Based in Vermont, they produce some trendy flour and publish one of the most popular catalogs for baker's in America.

"Oh I wish I had better news," said Shannon Zapalla at King Arthur. "But over the past few decades, home baking from scratch has declined dramatically. That's based on home flour use, and it's primarily because so much more flour is going into mixes.

"But if you count cake baking from a mix," she said reassuringly, "then people are baking more than ever." Not surprisingly, King Arthur recently introduced a line of all-natural baking mixes available from their catalog or from their Web site (kingarthurflour.com). I tried one. They're all right. In fact for cake mix, they're more than all right; but they're not like cake from scratch.

Then I consulted The Home Baking Association, a mecca for home bakers in Kansas City. "Scratch baking," according to the association's Web page, "not only teaches math, science and history, but also encourages self-esteem, cultural awareness, team-building skills and when done at home, can promote family togetherness. These skills will help prepare today's youth to cope in this high pressure, ever-changing world."

I guess. Cake baking kept me off the streets as a kid. I guess you could say I was fairly obsessed with baking. I had to put up with my friends calling me Susie Homemaker and Betty Crocker, but they didn't abandon me; as soon as the cakes were ready to cut, I was plenty popular.

"Good cake, Betty," said my next-door neighbor between bites. "Now do you want to shoot some baskets?"

"Anyone who spends any time in the kitchen," wrote Laurie Colwin in Gourmet magazine in 1990, "eventually comes to realize that what she or he is looking for is the perfect chocolate cake." I knew that's what I was looking for when I first took up a spoon and turned on the oven at age 10. Those days, near the middle of the 20th century, may have been the heyday of homemade layer cakes. Moms believed that cakes were wholesome for growing children and we were allowed a piece for an after-school snack pretty much any day of the week. (In fact, if we baked them ourselves and stayed out of Mom's hair, we could have as many slices as we wanted.)

By the early 1900s, Americans were baking cakes pretty regularly. The first modern cakes were often reflections of the heavy old fruit-and-nut things people ate in the 19th century, before the development of reliable baking powder and the rise of the thermostat-controlled oven. Lady Baltimore Cake, one of the most popular cakes of the pre-World War II era, was typical of the transitional stage. A relatively light, baking-powder cake covered all around with fluffy white icing, it held between its layers a dense filling of dried fruits and nuts. Even in the 1950s the wildly popular "German Chocolate" cake, with its gooey coconut-and-nut filling, reflected the old style. (That cake by the way had nothing to do with Germany; it was a purely American confection named for pastry chef Samuel German, who worked for the Baker's Chocolate Co.)

But to people like me who grew up during the Cold War and the great Pax Americana, the ideal form of the cake was cake and frosting and nothing else. If nuts or coconut were involved, they were pressed into the sides of the frosted cake, or sprinkled over the surface - incidental things, not buried in a heavy filling.

My Great Aunt Lois' coconut cake is a prime example. Ensconced in a nursing home in Oregon now, she wanders freely from the past to the present among the living and the dead who inhabit her world. Whenever I visit, she's likely to share details from conversations she had earlier in the day with my grandfather (he died in 1962) or with my great grandmother, who died when I was still in college. But when I went to visit her last year, she somehow managed to find a recipe for her favorite cake, handwritten on an ancient index card, and she wanted me to bake it for her.

So I wheeled her out of the nursing home, swung by the grocery store, and over to my cousin's house, where we turned on the oven and went to work. Unable to find a hammer, I broke open the coconut with a cast iron frying pan (and broke the pan while I was at it). Lois shouted instructions from her wheelchair and wondered how the devil a boy ever learned to cook anyway.

"The first time we baked this cake," she said, "we all liked it so much that we ate the whole thing and baked another one."

Greg Atkinson, Canlis executive chef, is the author of "In Season" (1997) and "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook" (1999) from Sasquatch Books.