Great taste. I was curious on this and wanted to try it out for my father-in-laws birthday. This came out similar to what I would consider a spice cake and I did not really taste the jam. Thank you for sharing the recipe and your story about Georgia.

My grandmother, too, was a proud Virginia lady who called her recipes receipts (which is the traditional old English way).She called her jam cakes Tennessee Jam Cake because she had eaten her first one at a wedding there and had requested the recipe from a cousin who had cooked it for the wedding feast. It is entirely correct to call a jam cake, in the south, Tennessee Jam Cake because it is traditionally associated with that state and its long and noble culinary traditions- no matter where it was invented -England has a very similar cake- it is Tennessee Jam Cake! Last word! Tradition rules! Oh yes, I can't imagine anything but burnt sugar icing on jam cake; by all means try cream cheese, but I think you will go back to caramel. I use cream to keep the burnt sugar from curdling- forget the calories! My grandmother beat the egg whites separately to lighten the cake. Misha

Fabulous cake! I followed the recipe exactly and it was perfect. I frosted it with Caramel Frosting, but think the Cream Cheese Frosting would be yummy too! Maybe next time I'll try caramel between the layers and Cream Cheese outside the cake -- the best of both worlds!

Georgia was my grandmother, but she passed away in January of this year. She was poor and had no access to cookbooks. Of course, there are tons of jam cake recipes out there, but this was her own special recipe, written and modified many times to make good use of the things she had lots of -- homemade blackberry jam, walnuts, buttermilk, butter and eggs. I can't speak for anyone else's recipe, but my grandma's special tricks included cutting circles from brown paper, greasing those with butter, and lining her round cake pans to keep the cakes from sticking. She was a phenomenal person.