A bite of history: Reviving the election cake that helped fuel America’s first vote

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Elections for the president of the United States have always been long and kind of messy. Even in the first election, when George Washington ran unopposed, it took Congress more than two months to count the votes and certify the Election Day results.

The bakers at Hewn Bakery in Evanston, Illinois, are working to educate people about the length of the electoral process through what they know best — baked goods.

Specifically, through a little bundt cake dubbed “Election” or “Hartford” cake. One bite into the dense dough, laced with allspice and cinnamon, dotted with red cherries, blueberries and dried ginger, and topped with a white sugar glaze, and it becomes more than a tasty snack — it’s a 200-year-old piece of history.

“I'm a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Mayflower daughter,” says Ellen King, co-owner and Director of Baking Operations at Hewn Bread. “I was cleaning out family stuff that got dumped on me. In one book belonging to my grandmother’s grandmother I found a reference to this cake that they made for elections and I was like ‘Oh, alright, because, you know, they would feed the poll workers through the long process of counting votes.’”

Back then, electors were first voted for and then sent to cast their votes as representatives of their state (how electors were chosen was left up to each state). In December 1788, that process took six weeks and leaked into January 1789, with electors gathering a month later to vote for who would become president.

The birth of a new republic meant not everything was operational from the start. In this first election, New York failed to agree on its electors in time for Election Day. North Carolina and Rhode Island couldn’t participate because they hadn’t yet ratified the Constitution. After a quorum was finally established, Congress counted and certified the electoral vote on April 6, 1789.

“Elections were such a big deal, they were an all day affair,” says King, who began her career as a historic preservationist. “There weren’t primaries like today, everything would be done in one day so it was a festive time. People you hadn’t seen in awhile, because they were out working their farm or lived far away, turned up. Hartford, Connecticut became the town that capitalized on the election cakes because Hartford was pretty much the place that was the colonial capital.”

Pulling from her historical background, King points out that recipes back then were made for industrial-sized quantities, not for home bakers. This was emphasized by Amelia Simmons in her 1796 cookbook, “American Cookery” — the first of its kind in the U.S. — a reprint of which King owned and referenced to craft her own product.

“Those recipes call for 14 pounds of sugar, 30 quarts of flour, and like, 10 pounds of butter,” says King. “They also didn't necessarily have an oven in their house or ovens big enough unless they were really wealthy and had people that worked for them.”

Today, King and her partner, Julie Matthei, co-owner of Hewn, have taken the guesswork out of a 200-year-old recipe and adapted it for anyone who wants a bite of history. King credits Owl Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina, for inspiring this Election Day tradition, which began in 2016 but was skipped in 2020 because of the pandemic. The Election Day cake is available for pre-order through Oct. 30 for $17.89 (an homage to the year of the first presidential election), with a portion of sales going to Common Cause, a pro-democracy advocacy group. The cake will only be available on Election Day as a way of honoring the traditions of the past.

And if you’re wondering about the duo’s politics, King says it’s all in the cake.

“I added a whole lot more blueberries to this cake, and cherries were very subtle,” the baker stated. “Some people won't even get a bite of the cherry.

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