Cold WATER Cake - Desperation Cake Recipe | Hard Times

greetings my beautiful loves I'm emmy welcome back to another episode of

hard

times

where I explore food and

recipe

s from

hard

times

today I'm going to make a

recipe

to bake a

cake

from this book called pioneer cookbook written by ruth stone and this Carol Carroll me He sent it very kindly. Thanks again for sending me this. I also made a vinegar

cake

, a despair cake with this cookbook, and if you haven't seen that video, I'll put a link below, this would also be a good time for you to subscribe if you're not already, okay, so the recipe I'm going to make is called

cold

water

cake, so when I was doing a little research I found other ice recipes.

water

cake and I thought it was really interesting that they specifically specify that it is ice water or

cold

water.

Now there may be a bit of science behind this, the idea that cold water will prevent the butter in this recipe from melting as easily and that it increases a fluffier or softer texture of the cake, so I don't know if that's really true. true, but the proof will be in the pudding in the cake, which is why this cookbook includes approximately four generations of recipes dating back to the 19th century and does. it doesn't include a frosting recipe so I'm going to make a frosting recipe from this book and these are depression era recipes and this was very kindly sent to me by Katherine, a long time viewer since 2013.

Catherine, many Thank you for sending this for me and I'm going to make this recipe for 7 minute frosting. It contains egg white, sugar, cream of tartar and water, so it doesn't contain butter at all, so it should be interesting, so let's go ahead and make our cake. I have a Barbra Streisand song in my head and I have no idea how she got there. butter temperature a cup of sugar stir the butter and sugar until creamy okay good luck so I have beaten the butter and sugar together and now we are going to combine our eggs so we need to separate them to avoid accidents improper. in terms of contaminating our oh I have a device for this, just a minute to travel through time and space, I have a device for my egg yolks, so I bought it while I was in Japan, this is definitely something not They would have during pioneer times, but It's fun to try it now, this is an egg separator, so it's a little silicone chicken and then it looks like it's pooping the egg, so let me go wash this, so I I imagine that's kind of the Achilles heel of this article, like how? properly wash the inside of this chicken because you're fine, I'll worry about that later, right, okay, first let's 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 at room temperature because I read that beating the whites at room temperature is easier, although it does make the yolk a little more brittle, so this will be a real test for this egg separator. Oh, I have some shell. in there, go out and squeeze it by its wings and then suck out the egg yolk, it totally worked, it just disappeared into its butt, okay, now let's add the egg yolk back in here, it broke instead of just coming out, but it separated so I'm going to rinse this out and make sure there's no broken egg yolk in there because I don't want to contaminate my egg white, our egg white, I'm going to put it in this big bowl and I'll do it again oh no, oh , that egg actually smelled bad, well, it's a rotten egg.

I've never had a bad egg before. Wow, that was interesting. It was a store-bought egg. It was the first time I got one. rotten egg before, they always tell you when the kitchen is shown, oh, make sure you crack the egg separately, but of course I never do it, but you do it in case you get a rotten egg, our chickens, our chickens backyard, they are on a laying break, it's winter here. and they usually slow down if they don't 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. Interesting, okay let's move on, maybe it had a little crack. I don't know, suck it, wow, the white one is fine, separate white, this feels bad, I feel like I'm taking the guts out of the chicken, okay, poop, that one worked much better, look it's complete, so the device works . chicken butt, put it there. oh no, in my attempt to give you a good chance, I ruined a perfectly good egg, okay, for my last egg, I'm just going to use my hands to separate it because I'm tired of this, so it works, is it worth it? no it's cute yes definitely if you're interested in winning this check out my social media.

I will give away this little egg separator. Okay, now I have eggs everywhere. Okay, let me go get another egg. Now this is my favorite. way to separate the eggs you take the egg and you break it into something and you use your impeccably clean hands and you simply remove the yolk now mix this now we are going to measure 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 teaspoons half of salt this by the way is a Danish whisk it was sent to me by diana diana thank you very much and it is supposed to be used to mix things more efficiently so we will use it for the dough and now that our dry ingredients are mixed we will alternate adding the dry ingredients with our cup of cold water, so let me measure that out and now we're going to add some flour, oh yeah. works great, really makes stirring effortless because you just swipe it.

My only question is how easy it will be to clean, it's probably no worse than just a normal whisk, okay? Yeah, look at that. quick, okay, now I'm going to add some cold water and the instructions specifically say little by little now add some flour, look how fast that mixture is, that's great, there's our dough, let's leave this aside momentarily now we can take our Three egg whites and beat them. He says that you have to do it until they are well beaten. What does that mean? I'm not exactly sure, but I'll beat them to medium-stiff peaks and then slowly fold them into the dough to give it a little give. more yeast, so I'm going to do this by hand because, after all, these are the pioneer days, so here we go.

Have you tried brushing your teeth or beating egg whites with your non-dominant hand? A fun little experiment you will see that your dexterity on the wrist. Don't you know how to do it? But it's a good exercise that balances things out well. It's well whipped and I'm at the point of probably medium stiff peaks. Add it here now, let's see how well it works for folding. This is my first time using it for this technique, so it feels a little awkward. I'm going to use my silicone spatula. Yeah, that feels a little more comfortable to fold, so no baking instructions.

I'm going to bake them in two nine-inch cake pans and I'm going to lubricate them with a little spray. I'm sure they didn't have this in the pioneer days, but we're going to divide this dough between the two of us and spread it out to the sides at a 350 degree angle. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out to clean, okay watch a little so the cakes have finished baking, they were in the oven for about 30 minutes and after they cooled for about 10 more minutes or At least I inverted them on a wire rack to allow them to cool completely before tackling the frosting, so the instructions say in a double boiler combine two egg whites that I've separated here with a third cup of water, a quarter teaspoon of cream of tartar and half a cup of sugar. now we're supposed to beat this all together for about seven minutes until we get a beautiful glaze.

My stopwatch starter feeders were around in the depression era, so I'm going to use my electric beaver, here we go, so my stopwatch. It says 11 minutes and 50 seconds, but I went up to get a new battery, so I'll take a minute and say it took about 10 minutes instead of seven minutes, but look, that's beautiful, that's beautiful, that's bright, a little bit of wax paper to keep my cake clean one third of this beautiful frosting look how white is in the middle here now we're going to put our second piece of cake on top now we're just going to cover it with the rest of the frosting I'm coming To make these little bumps, give it a old and small look.

Like, let's remove these pieces of wax paper. They've done their job, so let me try the frosting on its own. Definitely a grain, the sugar is still there. present in its crystalline form, it did not dissolve and perhaps that could have been avoided if I had added the sugar to the water first and combined it until the sugar was completely melted to create more syrup. The instructions didn't specify that I just said: put all the ingredients in a bowl in a double boiler and beat for seven minutes, so if I had to make this recipe again or if you make this, that's what I would suggest doing, but it is a very nice, although it is not like that.

Here we go and there, okay, Dokie artichokes, let's try it. It's a kind of white and yellow cake. It's okay, Itadakimasu. The texture of that frosting bothers me. That granularity. I can feel all those grains of sugar in there, but not the cake. bad in terms of texture and taste, it reminds me of the cake of a crumb cake or a coffee cake, it has a bit of density, it is quite moist, the texture of the crumb is not as fluffy as a typical type of cake, the flavor is butter because we don't add anything to this in terms of flavor, no vanilla or almond, it just tastes really good butter, I think in terms of frosting, I think I would definitely prefer a chocolate frosting, the cake is so simple I think It needs a little more pizzazz, although this is a very humble cake, so I felt that the simple seven minute frosting was appropriate for this type of cake, but for tough times, this is actually a very good cake.

Thank you all so much for watching. Many thanks to Katherine. Carol and Diana for her contributions to this video and for making it possible, thank you again for watching. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you learned something. Share this video with your friends. Follow me on social media to see how you can win. the little egg separator likes this video subscribe and see you in the next one also take care bye