LUCKEY – For an at-home workout, try carrying around the pan for this carrot cake.

Luann Snyder estimated that the 13×9 pan of cake weighed 5 pounds.

The cake is heavy but very moist, which Snyder attributed to the 1 1/4cups of vegetable oil in it.

The cake recipe came out of the Bakery Lane Soup Bowl cookbook, circa 1971. Snyder said she got it in 1979 as a wedding shower gift.

She said she was looking through the book, saw the recipe for carrot cake, and decided to try it.

“I think it’s probably the only thing I’ve made out of here,” Snyder said about the cookbook.

She has a lot of church cookbooks, and the recipes she makes the most have worn pages similar to this carrot cake recipe page.

She has cookbooks from Pemberville’s Bethlehem Lutheran Church as well as a Wood County cookbook (whose cover is gone) that she also got as a shower gift.

Snyder and her husband, Craig, moved to Luckey in 1979 and raised three children in the village. She has seven grandchildren.

Craig died 15 years ago, she said.

When her kids come and visit, she’ll make them ham loaf, chicken cordon bleu or beef tenderloin.

Snyder is a 1975 Eastwood High School graduate who went on to get a nursing degree at Ohio State University.

She worked at St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo off and on for 35 years and taught nursing at Owens Community College in Perrysburg.

When cooking for the family, it was all from scratch.

The youngest of nine kids, Snyder learned to cook from her mother, Henrietta Schuerman, who also rarely followed a recipe.

Her mom taught all six girls how to cook, she said.

They canned and froze their own food from the garden and processed their own meat.

The garden went by the wayside when Snyder got married. She would take the kids to her father-in-law’s garden, where they would shuck sweet corn. She would freeze the corn and can the green beans. She also made applesauce and strawberry jam.

“My kids will not eat any other applesauce other than the homemade.”

The canning stopped before the kids moved out, Snyder said, and during COVID she cleaned out her basement and got rid of a lot of the old jar of vegetables.

If she’s cooking, she’ll ad lib; if she’s baking, she’ll follow the recipe, she said.

Snyder prefers cooking to baking.

“Honestly, you go to the trouble of baking and by the time everybody is done with their meal, they’re full,” she said.

She does make pies, with coconut cream being a go-to.

Now that Snyder is only cooking for one, she cooks much healthier than she did years ago.

“I’m a nurse and I figured out the way my mom cooked was probably not the best way to cook.”

Everything was fried, she said, and there was always red meat in the freezer.

Snyder said she and her mother-in-law used to can snipple beans and inherited a snippler when family members were cleaning out a house.

“I don’t think I’m going to make any snipple beans anytime soon,” she said with a laugh.

A slice of Luann Snyder’s carrot cake.

Marie Thomas-Baird | Sentinel-Tribune

Freeman Allen’s Carrot Cake

Ingredients

2 cups flour

2 cups sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 ¼ cup vegetable oil

3 cups grated carrots

4 eggs

½ cup chopped nuts

2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions

Combine dry ingredients in large bowl of mixer, mix until well blended, about 3-4 minutes.

Add oil to flour mixture while mixing then add the carrots and then the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each. Stir in nuts and vanilla and mix well.

Pour into greased and floured 13×9 inch pan and bake in preheated 350-degree oven for 50-60 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly touched.

Cool completely in pan and then frost with cream cheese frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

4 ounces cream cheese

¼ cup butter

2 cups confectioner’s sugar (about)

Directions

Combine cheese and butter in a small mixing bowl. Beat until light and fluffy. Add confection’s sugar a little at a time and beat to blend to the desired consistency. Use additional sugar if needed.

Spread on top of cake.