(calm music)
- Greetings my beautiful
lovelies, it's Emmy.
Welcome back to another
episode of Hard Times
where I explore food and
recipes from times of hardship.
Today I'm gonna be making a recipe,
actually baking a cake from this book
called "Pioneer Cook Book"
written by Ruth Stone,
and this was very kindly
sent to me by Carol.
Carol, thanks again
for sending this to me.
I have made a vinegar
pie, a desperation pie,
from this cook book as
well, and if you haven't
seen that video I will
put a link down below.
This would be an also a great
time for you to subscribe
if you're not subscribed already.
Okay, so the recipe
I'm going to be making,
it's called Cold Water Cake.
So when I was doing a
little bit of research,
I did find some other
recipes for ice water cake,
and I found that really interesting
that they specifically specify
that it's ice water or cold water.
Now there might be a little
bit of science behind this,
the idea of that the cold
water will prevent the butter
in this recipe from melting so readily
and that it increases a spongier
or a softer textured cake.
So I don't know if that's actually true
but the proof will be in
the pudding, in the cake.
So this cook book includes
about four generations worth
of recipes going all the
way back to the 1800s
and it does not include
a recipe for frosting,
so I'm gonna make a frosting
recipe out of this book,
and this is "Depression Era Recipes,"
and this was so kindly
sent to me by Catherine,
a long time viewer since 2013.
Catherine, thank you so
much for sending this to me!
And I'm going to be making this recipe
for Seven Minute Frosting.
It contains egg whites, sugar,
cream of tartar, and water.
So no butter in this whatsoever.
So that should be interesting.
So let's go ahead and make our cake.
I have a Barbara Streisand song in my head
and I have no idea how it got there.
Evergreen?
♪ Love soft as an easy chair ♪
Why?
Where, how do I even know that song?
(crickets chirping)
I don't know.
Strange things, strange things,
okay so back to the cake.
Quarter cup of room temperature butter.
One cup of sugar.
Stir butter and sugar to a cream.
Okay.
Good luck with that, good grief.
So I've creamed the
butter and sugar together
and now we're going to combine our eggs.
So we need to separate them.
Prevent any undue accidents
in terms of contaminating our,
oh I have a gadget for this!
Just a minute!
♪ Da, da, da, da, da, da ♪
♪ La, da, da, da, da, da ♪
♪ Do, dun, dun ♪
Traveling through time and space,
I have a gadget for my egg yolks.
So I picked this up while I was in Japan.
This is definitely something
they would not have
during Pioneer times,
but it's fun to test out.
Now this is an egg separator.
So this is a little silicone chicken.
Then it looks like it's
pooping out the egg.
So let me go wash this.
So I would imagine that's a sort of
Achilles heel of this item.
How do you properly wash
the insides of this chicken
'cause you're, well I'll
worry about that later, right?
Right.
Okay first we're gonna crack
the egg which I already did.
Which one did I just crack?
I think it was this one.
Oh yeah, now these eggs have been sitting
at room temperature because I've read
that beating egg whites at
room temperature is easier,
although it makes your yolk
a little bit more fragile,
so this is gonna be a real
test for this egg separator.
Ooh, I got some shell in there, get out!
And squeeze it by its wings,
and then suck up the yolk.
It totally worked!
It just disappeared in its butt.
Okay now we're gonna add
the egg yolk back into here.
Ooh, ooh.
It kinda just broke rather
than just pooping out.
But it did separate it, so
I'm gonna rinse this out
and make sure there's no
broken egg yolk in there
'cause I don't wanna
contaminate my egg white.
Our egg white, I'm gonna
put it into this big bowl
and we shall do that again.
Ooh, no go.
Ooh that egg actually smelled bad.
That's a bad egg, I've
never had a bad egg before!
Wow.
So that was interesting,
that was a store bought egg,
that was the first time I've
ever gotten a bad egg before.
They always tell you on the cooking shows,
"Ooh, make sure you break
your egg separately,"
but of course I never do, but you do that
just in case you get a bad egg.
Our chickens, our back yard chickens,
are on a laying hiatus.
It's winter here and so they
usually slow down, if not stop,
which is fine by me.
But that was interesting, I've
never had a bad egg before.
It definitely had a bad egg
smell to it, interesting.
Okay, let's keep going.
Maybe it had a tiny crack
in it, I don't know.
Suck it up.
Wow, the white is just,
okay white, separate.
This feels wrong.
I feel like I'm pulling
the chicken's guts out.
Okay.
Poop, that one worked a lot better.
See, it's full.
So the gadget works.
Chicken butt, place it on there.
Look at that, oh no.
In my attempt to get you a good shot,
I ruined a perfectly good egg.
Okay, for my last egg I'm
just gonna use my hands
to separate it because I'm tired of this.
So it works, sort of.
Is it worth it?
No.
Is it cute, yes, definitely.
If you're interested in winning this,
please check out my social media.
I will be giving this
little egg separator away.
Okay, now I've got egg everywhere.
All right, let me go grab another egg.
Now this is my favorite
way of separating eggs.
You take the egg and you
crack it into something
and you use your impeccably clean hands.
And you just pull it away, yolk.
Now mix this together.
Now we're gonna measure
out our dry ingredients.
We need two and a half cups of flour.
One, two and a half
teaspoons of baking powder.
One, two, and a half.
A half teaspoon of salt.
This, by the way, is a Danish whisk,
it was sent to me by Dianna.
Dianna, thank you so much.
And it's supposed to mix
things with more efficiency,
so we'll use that for the batter.
And now that our dry
ingredients are mixed,
we're going to alternate
adding the dry ingredients
with our cup of cold water.
So let me measure that out.
And now we're gonna add some flour.
Oh yeah, it does work really nicely.
It really makes the
stirring kind of effortless
'cause it just kind of goes through it.
My one question though is how easy
is this going to be to clean?
Probably no worse than just
a regular whisk, right?
Okay, yeah, look at that!
Super fast, okay.
Now I'm gonna add some cold water.
And the instructions say
specifically a little at a time.
Add some flour.
Look how fast that mixes, that's great!
There is our batter, I'm gonna
set this aside momentarily.
Now we're gonna take our three
egg whites and beat these.
It says to do it until
they're well beaten,
what does that mean?
Not exactly sure, but I'm
gonna just beat these up
to medium stiff peaks and
then slowly incorporate that
into the batter so it gives
it some more leavening.
So I'm gonna do this by hand
because this is the
pioneer days after all.
So here we go.
Have you ever tried brushing your teeth
or beating egg whites with
your non-dominate hand?
Fun little experiment.
You'll see that your wrist
dexterity isn't up to snuff,
but it's good exercise, kind
of balances things out, right?
This is well beaten, and I'm at the point
of probably medium stiff peak.
Add that into here.
Now let's see how well
this does for folding.
This is my first time
using it for this technique
so it feels a bit awkward.
I'm gonna use my silicone spatula,
yeah that feels a little
more comfortable for folding.
So there are no baking instructions,
I'm gonna bake these into
two nine inch cake pans
and I'm going to lube
'em up with some spray.
I'm sure they didn't have this
back in the pioneer days, but.
I'm gonna divide this
batter between the two.
Spread it all the way to the
sides into a 350 degree oven
for 25 to 35 minutes, or until
a toothpick comes out clean.
Okay, see ya in a little bit.
So the cakes have finished
baking, they were in the oven
for about 30 minutes and after they cooled
for about 10 minutes
or so, I inverted them
onto a rack to allow
them to cool completely
before we tackle the frosting.
So the instructions
say, in a double boiler,
combine two egg whites,
which I've separated here,
with one third of a cup of water.
Quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar.
And one and a half cups of sugar.
Now we're supposed to just
beat this all together
for about seven minutes until
we get a beautiful frosting.
Set my stop watch, start.
Beaters were around in the depression era,
so I'm going to be using
my electric beater.
All right, here we go.
So much stop watch says
11 minutes, 50 seconds,
but I did go upstairs
to go get a new battery
so I'm gonna take off a
minute and say that took
about 10 minutes rather
than seven minutes,
but look at that, that's beautiful.
It's beautiful, it's glossy.
Some wax paper to keep
my cake stand clean.
Third of this beautiful frosting.
Look how white it is!
In the middle here, now we're gonna put
our second piece of cake on top.
Now we're just gonna top it
with the rest of the frosting.
I'm gonna do these little swoops,
give this kind of an old timey look.
I like it.
Gonna take these pieces of wax paper away.
They have done their job.
So let me taste the
frosting just on its own.
Mm, definitely a graininess,
the sugar is still present
in its crystal form.
It didn't dissolve, and perhaps
that could've been avoided
had I added the sugar to the water first
and combined that until the sugar
was completely melted
to get more of a syurp.
The directions didn't
specify that, it just said
put all the ingredients in
a bowl over a double boiler
and beat for seven minutes.
So, if I were to make this recipe again,
or if you make this, that's
what I would suggest doing.
But it does make for a very
pretty frosting though, doesn't it?
Here we go!
And there it is.
Okie dokies, artichokies.
Let's give this a taste.
It's kind of a yellow white cake.
All righty, Itadakimasu!
The texture of that
frosting kinda bugs me,
that granularity, I can feel
all those grains of sugar in there.
But the cake's not bad.
In terms of both texture
and flavor it reminds me
of the cake of a crumb
cake or a coffee cake,
it has a little bit of denseness
to it, it's pretty moist.
The crumb texture is not as fluffy
as a typical kind of cake.
The flavor is butter because
we didn't add anything to this
in terms of a flavor,
no vanilla, no almond,
it just tastes very nicely of butter.
I think in terms of frosting
I think I would definitely
prefer a chocolate frosting.
The cake is so plain, I think it needs
a little bit more pizazz,
although this is a very
humble cake so I felt like the
seven minute plain frosting
was appropriate for this type of cake.
But for hard times, this is
actually a very good cake.
Thank you guys so much for watching,
big thanks to Catherine, Carol, and Dianna
for their contributions for this video
and for making it possible.
Thanks again for watching, I
hope you guys enjoyed that one,
and I hope you guys learned something.
Please share this video with your friends,
follow me on social media to see
how you can win the little egg seperator.
Like this video, subscribe,
and I shall see you in the next one.
Toodaloo, take care, bye!
(upbeat music)
(calm music)
