Spanish Bar Cake
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Spanish Bar Cake. A real old fashioned treat! A supermarket favourite from years ago, this simple raisin spice cake is easy to make, moist and utterly delicious.
Originally published December 2018.
A few weeks ago, I got a request from a reader for a recipe for Spanish Bar Cake. I had never heard of it before.
She explained that it was a cake made by a supermarket bakery that she loved many years ago. I set off to do a little research on this cake.
Spanish Bar Cake was a very simple bar shaped raisin spice cake with an unfussy vanilla frosting. Being a fan of old time recipes, I certainly became quite interested in finding a recipe.
Turns out this cake was made by Jane Parker Bakery and sold through the A&P supermarket chain in the US & Canada. The reader who sent me the request grew up in Ottawa.
I have since heard that it was available in Toronto when a friend was growing up there 20 or so years ago.
There were a few recipes I found on a few websites but none of them definitively said they were the original recipe.
I finally came across an old entry in an online food forum which claimed to have been gotten from Jane Parker Bakery.
The recipe was written for two 9x13 pans. Those two layers would have been frosted and stacked, then cut down the middle to produce 2 bar cakes.
What the Spanish inference relates to is completely lost on me, except if that's where the raisins came from.
Spanish Bar Cake, the result.
I cannot say with any certainty that this was the original recipe. The reader who tried it called it a "very good raisin spice cake" but not quite the flavour she remembered.
Memory is a funny thing though. We sometimes like to imagine things better than they actually were.
Then again, with such a widespread production of this cake, there may have been subtle differences in the recipe used regionally.
She noted that a tablespoon of cocoa, which some recipes add, would make it the darker colour she remembered. She also said the flavour was not so intense as she remembered.
The intenseness of flavour in this recipe would really have to come from the spices. My suggestion would be to add 1 tablespoon of cocoa to the dry ingredients and to up the amount of spices by half, if you want a more deeply flavoured cake.
So, for my taste, and Spouse's, who loves spice cake, this was a really delicious, easy to make cake.
We brought it to a friends house for dinner and it got rave reviews. Next time I will try it with the adjustments I mentioned, but I would be more than content to enjoy it again, just as we made it.
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Spanish Bar Cake
Spanish Bar Cake. A real old fashioned treat! A supermarket favourite from years ago, this simple raisin spice cake is easy to make, moist and utterly delicious.
Ingredients
- 2 cups water
- 1 cups raisins
- ½ cup vegetable shortening, or butter
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoons baking soda
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon ground cloves
- ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon ground allspice
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 large egg, beaten
- ½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans, (optional)
For the Frosting
- 2 ¼ cups icing sugar
- ¼ cup butter, at room temperature
- ½ teaspoon pure vanilla
- 1 to 2 tablespoons milk, more if needed
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease a 9x13 baking pan and line it with parchment paper.
- Add the water and raisins to a saucepan. Bring to a gentle boil and simmer for 10 minutes.
- Add the shortening to the boiled mixture. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.
- Sift together the sugar, soda, flour, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and salt.
- Add the sifted ingredients to the cooled raisin mixture, along with the beaten egg and the nuts, if you are adding them.
- Fold gently until the flour is just incorporated into the batter. Do not over mix.
- Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pan and Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
- Cool completely and ice with frosting if you like
To prepare the frosting
- Beat together the icing sugar, butter, vanilla and a tablespoon of milk until smooth.
- If necessary, add more milk until the frosting is a good spreadable consistency.
- Cut the cake in half, frost the first layer then top with the second layer and frost again. To get the characteristic lines on top, run the back of a fork over the top frosting in straight lines.
- This recipe also makes about a dozen cupcakes if you prefer.
Notes
The nutritional information provided is automatically calculated by third party software and is meant as a guideline only. Exact accuracy is not guaranteed. For recipes where all ingredients may not be used entirely, such as those with coatings on meats, or with sauces or dressings for example, calorie & nutritional values per serving will likely be somewhat lower than indicated.
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Rock Recipes a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Our product recommendations are almost exclusively for those we currently use or have used in the past.
Nutrition Information
Yield
12Serving Size
1 slice (1/12 of the cake)Amount Per Serving Calories 346Saturated Fat 2gCholesterol 13mgSodium 201mgCarbohydrates 64gFiber 1gSugar 38gProtein 2g
Made the cake exactly as written and we loved it. Very similar to the cake my mother brought home when I was a little girl in Winnipeg. Thank you again for a great recipe!
Spanish Bar Cake!!!! Wow, talk about memories! I grew up in southern Ontario and whenever Mom shopped at the A&P she'd bring home this as a treat. My husband grew up further north and he had never heard of it. I was, like, HOW could you grow up without Spanish-Bar-Cake? (Said as one word .. you would never shorten it to say Spanish Cake or Bar Cake, although you could say Spanish-Bar-Cake-From-the-A&P and that would be acceptable.) I MUST TRY THIS! Thanks, Barry! Love all your recipes.
I have been looking for a recipe for Spanish Bar Cake for years! So so glad I finally found it. I live in the bayous of south Louisiana. My grandmother and I had a ritual to “ making groceries” every Saturday morning at our A&P in Hammond Louisiana where we would always, always buy two Spanish Bar cakes. One was for the preacher and his wife that came to have lunch with us after church services and the other was for our daily breakfast every morning until it was all gone.. Thank you so very much for the recipe that brings so many memories of our relatives back to us! I will be cherishing this recipe to pass down to my grandchildren so they will be able to experience the same pleasures we had with good company, good friends, and good food! God bless!
My husband grew up in Toronto and I grew up in Sarnia Ontario, in the 60s and 70s. We both fondly remember Spanish Bar Cake. I recall it being much darker than in the picture (molasses perhaps). I don't recall nuts in the batter. I am excited to try this recipe and recreate one of our childhood favourites. Thanks for posting it.
It seems to me the Spanish Bar Cake had some molasses in it, which would definitely give it the darker color, rather than adding cocoa.
My mom used to buy Spanish bar cake as my birthday cake because it was my favourite cake; the last time I had it was about 14 years ago...
I will have to try this recipe!
This Spanish Bar Cake was a favorite when were growing up in Ontario. It was a dark cake and the taste was just... UGH!! YUM! A&P sold it back then 1970-1990's. So I'm going to definitely try making some myself Thank you for sharing your recipes.
I am so glad that I've finally found this recipe. This was by far my favorite cake when I was young. Can't wait to try it. Thank you for finding the original
Anxious to try this cake... Tried another recipe that didn't have ground cloves in it and it is very good but isn't just right. Thank you for your posting this recipe.
I went to Walmart to purchased a slice of their carrot cake. It reminded me of the Spanish bar cake my mom used to purchase at A&P in Oxford, NC. I came home to search for the recipe on YouTube and there it was! I had not thought of this cake until I tried the carrot cake at Wally’s World! I can’t wait to try this recipe as a child of the sixties.
The Jane Parker SPANISH BAR CAKE was DARK almost black colour. It had molasses and almost double the amounts of spice you mention. But your cake taste good as well.
Thank you for this recipe! I've enjoyed A&P's Spanish Bar Cake since I was a young child, eating along with a cup of tea (mostly milk and sugar LOL) with my English grandmother in Canada. I made this with a few changes and it was exactly as remembered. I used golden raisins (tried it with regular raisins but the cake was dry) and only used cinnamon for the spices. I left out the nuts as they were not in the cakes we had eaten. So easy to make and everyone has loved it so far!
I loved this cake and have scoured the internet for years looking for the recipe. I came across this one and have bookmarked it so that I can make it soon. It provoked me to do more searching and I came across the Jane Parker website and found out they still make fruitcakes but no longer the Spanish Bar Cakes. (At least none were available) They had listed the ingredients and I noticed no nuts were used in the original recipe. That surprised me because I thought for sure the recipe had nuts. So I am going to try both ways and see which one I like better. This is the link to the website that I found https://janeparker.com/collections/spanish-bar-cake.
This is going into my heritage recipes file. My friend used this recipe with sultanas for a coffee / tea and cake get together yesterday. Transporting time warp and to my tastebuds a bullseye hit of the Spanish Bar cakes that punctuated my childhood. Many Thanks!!!!!!!
Oh my. I thought I would never see a recipe for Spanish Bar Cake. My dad also worked for A&P in Ohio and this was a staple in our household. It was a memory until now. I'll definitely be making this for Christmas.