Hivemind moment

So, "everybody knows" that CocaCola Cake was invented during WWII right?

Hmmmm, was it? I can't find the smoking gun.

My 1943 Baker's Chocolate cookbook has a section on substitutions and includes a "no sugar" cake that has corn syrup instead. It also has advice on adapting most of the other recipes to replace part of the sugar with corn syrup or honey. Nothing about cola. Or even beet juice, which is supposedly the origin of Red Velvet.

Any thoughts/hints/places I should look? (Heck, anybody have an old CocaCola ad with the original purported recipe?)

Stage 1.1

OK - first recipe is ready for testing. Anybody up for baking a gluten-free gingerbread and then giving me a review?

Nerdgasm!

I'm slightly offended that all the goodies came along AFTER I graduated.

MSU (my Alma Mater) has both a cooking ephemera collection, as well as an historic cookbook collection

I can easily scamper down there to get a look at copyrighted materials at some point (and have John's permission to abandon him to do so).

I've got about 1/2 a cookbook's worth of recipes at least conceptualized at this point. This could get me the other 1/2, plus enough to compensate for the inevitable "editing out" process.

*squeee!!!*