What’s the story behind the Fiddlehead Cookbook’s North Douglas chocolate cake?

If you ask longtime Juneau residents what cake they want on their birthday or for special occasions, one answer comes up a lot — North Douglas chocolate cake. 

“People love this cake,” said Abigail Sweetman, a Juneau resident originally from Ketchikan. She spends nearly all of her free time coming up with new recipes in her Starr Hill apartment.

“I am a huge sugar person, and I grew up making a lot of desserts because it was something I like, something I couldn’t get much of in Ketchikan,” she said. “Most of my love of food came from baking at a young age.” 

For Curious Juneau, Sweetman asked KTOO about the cake’s origin.

While I started looking around for the people who named it, Sweetman gathered ingredients to make it at home.

“It has butter and oil, which is pretty decadent,” Sweetman said, reading aloud from the recipe. “She says to combine, basically like, most of the wet ingredients in the cocoa and bring it to a boil.” 

The recipe lives in the Fiddlehead Cookbook. The cookbook, which is older than Sweetman, is based on a restaurant that operated in Juneau for nearly 30 years. The Fiddlehead Restaurant closed two decades ago, but the cookbook — and North Douglas chocolate cake — has taken on its own life.

“It was a cake that I had in childhood,” she said. “and I’m like ‘I didn’t realize that they named a cake after North Douglas’ and I was like ‘There’s gotta be a story there.’”

The story is rather simple actually, according to Linda Zagar. She’s the baker the cookbook credits with bringing it to the restaurant. 

“My best friend’s mom made this cake, and it was called choco bake,” she said. “It has a real name. It’s a real recipe. I did not create the recipe. That’s what I always tell people. I just brought it.” 

Zagar moved to Alaska with that same best friend in the 1970s, and followed her now husband to Juneau. They’ve lived in North Douglas for decades.

She worked at the Fiddlehead Restaurant for several years, and worked in just about every role there — waiting tables, washing dishes, prep cooking — before she became the morning baker. Zagar said a lot of staff would bring in favorite recipes they had accumulated over the years. 

“For some reason, this one stuck,” she said.

Zagar added a couple of twists: she made it a layer cake, with more frosting, and added walnuts around the edge — though the nuts didn’t make it into the cookbook version. And, Zagar said, she loves chocolate, so instead of plain cocoa powder, she used dark. 

The name, however, was a savvy act of branding. 

“My boss at the time said, ‘Well, what’s the name?’ And I said, ‘choco bake’. And he goes, ‘Hmm, no.’ He goes, ‘You’re the North Douglas Baker. Let’s call it the North Douglas chocolate cake.’ And I think that’s half of it,” she said. “It has a cool name, yeah? But then it just became a thing.”

Nancy DeCherney was part of the Fiddlehead Restaurant too, as a cook and manager. 

“All of us were getting out of college, and there was money up here, and so we had the blessing of having a staff that was highly educated and full of — you know — it was the 70s,” she said. “Everybody was full of exciting ideas.”

DeCherney remembers what it was like to walk into the Fiddlehead. She described dark wood furniture and ferns, a smoking and non-smoking section.

She wrote the Fiddlehead Cookbook in the 90s and she said she loves hearing people talk about their favorite recipes from the cookbook. She’s glad it’s lived on. 

“I think partly, it’s not real difficult food,” she said. “It’s accessible. Some of it is a little unusual, but I think the average bear can cook it, and it’ll turn out okay.”

Back in her apartment, Sweetman pulled the cake out of the oven and started to assemble it. 

“I always want layer cakes to turn out a little better than they do, and then I usually get to the end of it and I’m like, it’s more important to me that this tastes good,” she said as she started frosting. 

For the record, it also looked good, with some extra decoration that wasn’t in the cookbook – edible eyeballs. 

The cake is rich and moist. You’ll probably want a glass of milk nearby. And Zagar says, it’s always better on the second day. 

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