Poor Man's Cake - No Eggs, No Butter, No Milk - The Hillbilly Kitchen

Hello friends and welcome to the peasant

kitchen

, today we are going to make a

poor

man's

cake

. This is a very old recipe, it is a delicious

cake

and it is quite simple. It has simple ingredients and is missing some things. If you look at our ingredients here, you'll see there. There is no

milk

, no

eggs

, no

butter

, everything that is normally found in a cake. Well, this recipe originated in the late '20s and early '30s and was popular until the '40s because those things were so hard to come by during that entire period. our past, especially in the '30s and '40s, when there were rations, you couldn't get those things.

It also started because many of the ingredients in this cake were handed out in food boxes during the 1930s, after the dust, when our country was going through a crisis. It was a very, very difficult economic time and people were really struggling just to survive, probably much worse than what we are going through now and I know many of you are going through difficult times, but if you look back at that period when time and See how our grandmothers and, for some of you, your great-grandfathers overcame this. I think they'll see that maybe things aren't so bad right now and maybe they can draw some hope from their stories, so take some time and look up some of them. stories, if you are not old enough to remember the stories your grandmothers told, look up some of them because there are a lot of them online and there is a high hope of finding them in their stories anyway, let's continue with this recipe.

I have a cup and a half of all-purpose flour, you don't really want self-raising flour in this and I haven't tried it with self-raising flour so I'm not sure what I would do because the way you cook it is a little different, so a cup and a half of all-purpose flour, a cup of water and I always use filtered water in recipes like this because water is such an important part that I don't want that chlorine in what I'm baking, I think the chemicals affect the way your final result maybe not much, but a little. I have about a cup and a half of raisins, this is half of a 14 or 16 ounce package and I have a half teaspoon of salt, cinnamon and cloves.

You can also add ginger and nutmeg to this if you want, you can add all the spices, you can even use pumpkin pie spice if you don't have these spices and I have a tablespoon of shortening if you've seen my videos before. I know I don't use it much, but that's what the original recipe called for and I wanted to keep this recipe authentic. You could substitute something like coconut oil or even

butter

, but like I said during the period this recipe comes from. of butter was rationed it was one of the things you didn't have unless you had a cow to make your own butter and I have half a cup of brown sugar or sorry one cup of brown sugar one cup of brown sugar you can substitute regular sugar in this recipe.

Brown sugar is a combination of molasses and regular white sugar and I think during the time period that this recipe came about, a lot of people probably used molasses to sweeten it and didn't. they had sugar or maybe they would use sargum or even maple syrup or honey to sweeten this cake because sugar was one of those things that was really in short supply and it was rationed and you just couldn't get it, but the recipe now calls for a cup. of brown sugar and I have half a teaspoon of baking soda and I have a tablespoon of water here and I'm going to show you what we're going to do with this, this is the secret of the cake. here, let me move my cakes, this is not like a typical box cake, you won't get a store bought box cake with this recipe, it's similar maybe to a banana bread in texture, but not quite, actually It's a little chewy, which I probably think because well, it doesn't have

milk

, it doesn't have

eggs

, you know that's going to affect the texture, but it's delicious and you can bake it and top it in different ways, I have some cream cheese frosting.

You'll find it here and I'll link the recipe to my cream cheese frosting in the description of this video below. It's actually very easy to do. The cake is usually covered with cream cheese frosting. Back then I wouldn't have had anything on me or I would. They've been coated with just a little bit of powdered sugar and we'll talk about that in a minute, but what you want to start with is put all of these things here, your water, your raisins, your spices, your shortening and your sugar in a pot and boil. so I'm going to throw all this in there, the water and the raisins, be careful, don't splash them everywhere, if you're not a fan of raisins, you can substitute cranberries or maybe even some other dried fruit and add your spices . and your shortening and your sugar you can also add pecans to this if you add pecans, although you want to wait until you add the flour, you don't want to put them in here and boil them, that wouldn't be good, but you could use pecans or even peanuts in this.

You don't have to like to stir this constantly or watch it very closely as it boils. You just want to make sure it doesn't overflow and you want to stir it because If you want the spices to dissolve in there and you want the sugar to be all dissolved and not blocked, the heat has to take care of that and distribute the butter and like I said, if you don't want to use it. shortening you can use coconut oil or butter or something like that and we're going to bake this in an 8x8 dish. You can double this recipe and make it in a 9 by 13 pan.

This is not really a cake you want to layer. you can bake it in a muffin pan, you know, do it in a muffin pan and do it in muffin pans. I think this would make excellent muffins and I'm going to make some muffins. I'll post pictures in the video so you can see what a muffin looks like and I'm also going to try this today with cranberries and walnuts and I'm going to try it with some chopped peanuts with the raisins so I'm going to make a few varieties today. I'll post pictures of everything and give you the options in the ingredient list in the description.

I want to grease your pan and I just wiped some of my butter onto the pan. You can also spray it with non-stick spray if you want. To depend on you, I said that this recipe comes from a time when we can draw some hope from it. It was created out of necessity because there were no severe food shortages, probably even more than what we experienced this spring. and the recipe is really good if you have older nuts, like the raisins have been in the cabinet for a while and maybe you bought them to store and you left them in there for a long time and they started putting sugar crystals in them and drying them out a little bit .

This recipe is great for that because you're going to sit here and you're going to boil them and you're going to let them soak so they can thicken again and that was one of the things that my grandmothers talked about making, they used everything, they didn't throw anything away, even if it was something that Maybe it was past its prime, they would still use it and they were grateful to receive it because there was a lot of shortage during that time and my grandmothers had very different things. stories my mother's mother she was

poor

she grew up in the countryside she farmed to feed her family they survived mainly from their farm they would sell some animals and they would sell part of their vegetable harvest maybe if they slaughtered some animals in the fall they would sell half of them and they would keep half of them and their crops, they would sell part of it and keep another part and I said I think a lot of people would probably sweeten this with sargamus or molasses during that time because they would actually do that which was not something they had to buy with hasty ration cards or with money because they didn't have any and I remember that when I was very little my grandfather grew sugar cane or sugar cane and he took it to the food and they pressed it and boiled it and made molasses with it and my grandmother used it. used in a lot of different flavored things but it's still sweet and my dad's mom lived in New Jersey and was a city girl and my grandpa was drafted in his mid 40's and he left her to take care of two babies.

The oldest was two and the youngest was a baby while he was gone and she really struggled because she didn't have a big family farm around her to feed her children. Like I said, their stories were very different, but they survived and they did different things to get through it, okay, this is boiling so I'm going to turn this off and what you do with this is you let it sit here, let it. sit until it cools to room temperature and that will take depending on how long or how hot it is or how ventilated it is, uh, 20 30 minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but if you're in a hurry, you can leave it.

You know, just let it cool until it's warm or if you have enough time you can let it sit there for hours and let the fruit soak in the water and syrup, so it's up to you how long you let it sit. there you can spend anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to half a day or more and once it sits there and cools it will turn into a nice thick dark syrup, I mean you can see how dark the raisins are now and that's what What do you want now, what we're going to do with our water and our baking soda is we're going to heat up this water and warm it up because you want your tablespoon of water to be hot, okay, this is very hot, now this is part of?

What makes this cake work? We're going to mix half a teaspoon of baking soda into our tablespoon of hot water and see what happens, see how it bubbles and you want to dissolve it, look at that in the hot water, that changes the texture. The cake that you don't want to skip now, if it's still warm, if you just let it cool for like 15 or 20 minutes, you can go ahead and pour the baking soda in here and you can see that it's still bubbling a little bit. A little, that's what you want now, I recommend sifting the flour to put it in this recipe because it doesn't have eggs or milk and it will help with the texture, it will be much denser if not.

I don't sift flour, so I'll just add my cup and a half of flour and sift it with my little strainer one of these days. I guess I'll have to break down and order a regular sieve, but what? sifting removes the lumps from the flour, but more than removing the lumps from the flour, it adds a lot of air to it, which will add air to your cake and make it a little bit lighter, and I'm going to add my baking soda and my water here and just stir this, you don't need a mixer and all that for this, no need to take out the mixer and dirty the mixer bowl, you can see the baking soda in there or maybe you can, it's bubbling and bubbling as you I stir and it's super active because you mixed it with hot water, okay, that's good and we're just going to throw it in our greased pan, spread it out a little bit and I can see that the batter is about the consistency of muffin batter, it's a little bit thick, it's not like cake batter, cake batter is much more portable than this, you're going to put this in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 25 to 30 minutes if you make a double batch and you make it in a baking pan. 9 by 13, you'll want at least 30 minutes, maybe even a little bit longer if your oven gets really hot, you might want to turn it down to 325, but bake. to 350 unless you have a very very hot oven and I know ovens vary for about 25 minutes, in 25-30 minutes your cake will come out of the oven and look like this, it will be nice and golden.

Brown it, it should be firm and you should be able to taste it with a toothpick and it has a little bit of bounce to it, you know, like a normal cake or a muffin or something that has eggs and buttered milk and all that, but like I said it's a very texture. different and a different flavor and if you are looking for something different that you can make with pantry ingredients this is definitely the place and if you have people with dairy allergies this is definitely the place because there is no dairy in So this cake is perfect for all those people with dairy allergies, when, like I said, this recipe came out of that period of time when there was such a shortage, if it was topped with anything, it would have just had a little bit of powdered sugar. sprinkled on top unless maybe it was someone's birthday or something they could have splurged and made a buttercream frosting if they could get some butter or a cream cheese frosting like what I have here looks like this and is modern if it's made now, it's usually topped with the cream cheese frosting and I'll link like I said to that video in the description so you can see how to make it if you don't know, but it's just cream cheese, butter, vanilla and sugar, that's all what's in it, it's a simple, just mix it up super easy, like this cake, it's very simple, it's very indulgent, there are many varieties you can make with it, if you don't like raisins, use some blueberries, you can add walnuts to it for a different texture and a totally different taste, you can put more spices in it, warm it up a little bit for me, cinnamon and cloves are enough, I don't need more spices than that, but if you want more, certainly put more in there and you can make it simple with a little of powdered sugar like this or you can mix cream cheese frosting and put that on it but I said this cake comes from a time where if we look back at that period we see what it was like our grandmothers passed by and survived and after that period our nation and the entire world literally flourished, they called it the greatest generation because they rebuilt the country afterthat horrible desperate period and everything grew and everyone prospered, it was just a wonderful period, so if you need hope, look back, look at the past and read your Bible, see how things changed in the Bible, there were always cycles, there were always periods. where the people were desperate, um, where God's people were disobedient, they were out of favor, they went through famine, they went through enslavement, but he always helped them through it and always brought them back to prominence and the same is true if you look at more modern times, like I said, the period that our grandparents went through and from the 1930s to the 1950s or the late 1940s, anyway, that period between 1930 and 1945, look at that period and watch how they came up and watch what happened after that and continue to pray and have faith and pray for our nation pray for each other check on each other look back at some of these older recipes and maybe find some deliciousness I mean, no There's nothing that gets you through a tough time like something that tastes good, they don't really call it comfort food for no reason, it's comforting in tough times so check out some of these old recipes like this one, this is really good, I made it the other day and he hadn't done it. in a long time and my brother asked me if I had made a video about it and I said no when he said well you definitely need it and you know, not only because it's a good recipe, but it's pretty inexpensive to make because it's a pantry. friendly recipe and it is a recipe for the times we are going through and before we leave I want to leave you with Romans 15 13. now the god of hope fill you with all joy and peace and believing that you will abound in hope. by the power of the holy spirit my brothers and sisters if we abound in hope by the power of the holy spirit he is in us do not lose hope if your hope is in Jesus Christ then you should be full of joy and peace and show that to the world, share it with the world and share a piece of the poor people's pie with them because even in difficult times we can find joy, we can find peace and we have a piece of pie.

Thank you very much to all for joining us. The Hillbilly Kitchen, if you haven't already, don't forget to like and subscribe before you leave and until next time remember to put God first.