HOT WATER Desperation Pie | HARD TIMES - recipes from times of scarcity

greetings my beautiful loves I'm emmy welcome back to another recipe from

hard

times

where I explore food and

recipes

from

times

of food

scarcity

today's recipe comes to me from marjory marjorie thank you very much for sharing this recipe she sent me an email with this recipe familiar

water

cake apparently Margie's grandmother made this recipe during the great depression and it is a cake that has a cream that is predominantly made with

water

, so this particular cake recipe falls under the umbrella of desperate cakes that They were made when there wasn't much around. you just use what you have in your pantry and along the same lines there is something called vinegar cake, which was a cake that used vinegar as a flavoring agent for the cake cream when fruits were not in season.

Another example would be hoosier milk cake which comes from indiana, it is also called milk and sugar cake, sugar and milk cake which uses milk and sugar to create the cream for the cake, so I want to address all of these cake

recipes

, but today I'm going to start with the water cake, the first thing we should do. It's now my favorite pie crust recipe because it comes together so quickly and this recipe was adapted from Pioneer's friend Pam's perfect pie crust recipe, so I'll put the link below in case you're interested. I'd like to do it in a food processor, a cup of all-purpose flour, now I'm going to add a stick of butter that's been cut up and it's really cold, then I'm going to pulse this until I get some nice crumbs and everything. the butter bits are covered with flour if you don't have a food processor you can also do this with a pastry blender or a couple of forks this shouldn't be that

hard

to open but that's okay that's what you want it looks nice and crumbly and then we will add the last quarter cup of flour.

Then we'll add a tablespoon of powdered sugar, so the next step is to add some ice water. an eighth of a cup, which is about a tablespoon and a half of ice water, turn on the machine and then a dough will form and once a dough is formed, stop the machine and then the dough done, here we go and do this slowly until a dough forms so stop and then pulse it because sometimes the water builds up around the blades and there it goes you can hear it start to form a doe and as soon as it starts to do that and a doe starts to form ball of dough around the blades.

We're done, easy pie dough couldn't be easier, so another thing I like about this pie dough recipe is that you can work the dough right away, like some pie dough recipes say. oh, wrap the dough, put it in the refrigerator, let it rest before you can roll it out. Yeah, this honey doesn't have time for that, so I like the fact that I can work this in right away instead of using a lot of flour to roll it out. dough I like to use wax paper or you can even use plastic wrap to wrap two pieces of whatever paper you have and then place the dough right on the needle, get the blade out because we don't need the stragglers and this dough to stick.

It's wonderful, it's really flexible, soft and easy to work with, which is why Pam's original recipe calls for a combination of butter and lard, but I only use butter for two reasons: one, I don't usually have lard and two , I simply love the taste of the buttery crust. Now that I have it on a small disk, I'm going to take another piece of wax paper, place it right on top, and spread it out. Since this dough has not been refrigerated, it is very soft and easy to work with when I roll the dough. I like to roll from the center out and try to keep a circle if I can give it a quarter turn or so as you work it from the center out and hopefully you can keep a round shape which will help you when you're trying to line the cake pan, okay, it looks pretty good, so I have a nine inch cake pan here and it looks like it's going to fit now to go into the cake pan, we just remove the top layer, invert it and peel it off. .

Remove it carefully because we don't want to break it and then just lift it up so it can fit onto the plate. It's quite big. Great, now that we have all this extra dough around the edges, don't cut it off, so. just roll it up and tuck it in and this is going to be the edge of our pie, it's going to be nice and thick and then we're going to flute it, this is also the pie crust that I used in my mock apple pie recipe if you've made it. I haven't seen that that's another Depression-era recipe that uses Ritz crackers to make a mock apple pie.

I'm a big fan of big flutes or small pleats or granulations. Battlements is not the right word because it's like in a castle anyway, I like it really deep. flutes in my cake, so what I do is I take these two fingers here on my left hand and make a little kind of V and I use, you know, one of my fingers and I just push in the middle like this, I go pushing in the middle , I look around. pushing in between now if you want it to be tighter just make the space smaller it's really up to you because again this is your cake so there's the beautiful cake batter.

I'm going to put this in the refrigerator and let it cool and set. nice and cold while I make the filling which is a great way when it comes to pies, if you don't want your pie dough to shrink make sure the crust is nice and cool and cold and that will reduce the shrinkage okay , I'll be right back. Now we are ready to make the filling and the filling contains a cup of butter. Now it doesn't specify if it should be melted, if it should be whatever, but it does say that the ingredients should be creamed, so I imagine the butter shouldn't be cold. so I want to share with you one of my favorite techniques for getting butter to room temperature because I never have the forethought or preparation to make butter an hour in advance to get it to room temperature so here's my trick too if you try.

When putting it in the microwave, as some of you may know, you end up getting a sort of partially melted, partially cold lump of butter, which doesn't really help you when trying to get the creamy consistency needed for baking, especially cookies and cakes etc., so this is my favorite technique. What you want to do is take the cold butter, leave it in its wrapper, get something to pound on it, get some wax paper, this is the leftover wax paper that I use to roll out the base of my cake, put the butter on. in and we proceed to cream the butter, done, here we go, we get all your butter aggression out, so now you have butter that's probably about half an inch thick, let it sit there in about 10 minutes and it'll be perfectly perfectly creamy. super consistency one cup of sugar three eggs I'm going to go ahead and beat this up first, so just the eggs and the sugar, three tablespoons of flour and now my cup of butter, I'm going to place my other flat piece of butter in the bowl, a pinch of salt and now for the namesake of this cake we are going to add water a cup of boiling water so remember that there are three eggs here we do not want to curdle the eggs we are going to introduce the hot water slowly which looks quite watery but we are ready to fill our cake, now pour it on the cake, it looks pretty good, it actually fits perfectly.

It says to bake this at 350 degrees for an indeterminate amount of time, so I'm going to keep watching it for maybe 15 to 20 minutes until the custard sets and then I'll come back, okay, see you in a moment, bye, 350 degrees, bingo, bango , okay my loves, I'm back and here is my beautiful water cake and it turned out beautiful, although it had a bit of a crust cave. here and here the recipe specifically says a no-bake pie crust. I think if I had blind baked it or baked it before filling it, I may not have collapsed it, it still looks great.

It took me about 45 minutes to cook it. The outside started to brown and the inside browned beautifully and I think that has to do with how much butter is in this cake and it looks really good so after I took it out of the oven I let it cool on the counter and then I I put in my refrigerator to let it cool completely whenever you have an egg custard base recipe. I think it's always a good idea to let it cool completely to remove some of that eggy flavor, otherwise it will taste very, very eggy.

I think that's true for pumpkin pies and any recipe that has a lot of eggs let it cool completely, okay I can't wait to try this, oh look it looks like a custard, oh it's beautiful, look it smells so good, here we go, okay, water pie. here we go itadakimasu oh that's good, really nice and buttery, it melts with a very soft and flexible cream texture and it tastes a lot like pudding inside in terms of the filling itself, it's slightly eggy sweet but not too much but do it. You know what it really reminds me of, it reminds me of those little egg custards you can get when you go to Chinatown, if you go to dim sum you can order them, they're my favorite when I was a kid, they're small, that big, They're little custom tarts basically miniature ones that have egg custard inside and they're sweet and delicious and the crust is flaky, that's what it absolutely reminds me of.

The crust is a little different traditionally when you have dantots, the crust is very flaky. and it doesn't have a buttery flavor, it's more lard or lard based, while it has a beautiful buttery flavor, well, the bottom crust has absorbed some of the cream, so it has a bit of tooth, it's a little chewy, it's more like a biscuit, I love the amount of salt in here, the salt really balances the sugar and butter, so there you have it, water cake number one in the series of my desperate cakes, Let me know in the comments if there are other recipes or other cakes.

Would you like me to try it or try to share this video with your friends follow me on social media subscribe like it and I'll see it in the next one too take care bye ok