Make this Depression Era Crazy Cake Recipe with Pantry Ingredients (2024)

FAQs

What was depression cake made of? ›

The ingredients for a Wacky Cake include everyday kitchen staples that you likely already have in your home; these ingredients include all-purpose flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, oil, vinegar, and vanilla extract.

What Are Vintage Cakes? Vintage cakes are vintage or “retro” because they've been around (and around and around) for centuries. They're known for their frilly, over-piped design and can be traced back to the French Rococo style of the 1700s – an age known for its ornate and gilded designs.

The recipe has roots from The Great Depression, when ingredients like butter and milk were expensive or heavily rationed. It goes by a few names you may recognize – 'Wacky' Cake, Poor Man's Cake, or Depression Cake.

A bizarre form of counter-magic, the witch cake was a supernatural dessert used to identify suspected evildoers. In cases of mysterious illness or possession, witch-hunters would take a sample of the victim's urine, mix it with rye meal and ashes and bake it into a cake.

Technically, funeral cake is a chocolate sheet cake with fudge icing and topped with crunchy pecans and big enough to feed a crowd—which you may recognize as Texas Sheet Cake.

To make it, start by combining tomato soup and baking soda together in a bowl. This will help neutralize the acidic taste of the canned ingredient. Next, beat together sugar, butter, egg, cinnamon, cloves, and salt in a large bowl until smooth. Mix in the tomato soup mixture, then stir in flour and raisins.

A sweetened yeast dough enriched with butter and milk is cut into small pieces, rolled into balls, dipped in melted butter, rolled in a cinnamon-sugar mixture, and layered into a Bundt pan.

What is lazy cake? Basically, it's like a no-bake brownie made with crushed animal crackers. Butter, sugar, cocoa powder and mix get boiled on the stove for 10 minutes and then the crushed animal crackers get folded in. The animal crackers give it the structure since we're not using any flour or anything like that.

The world's oldest known cake, baked during the reign of Pepi II in Egypt between BCE 2251 and 2157. Alimentarium, Vevey, Switzerland. The Egyptians gave us the world's oldest known cake–and also the world's oldest Tupperware as it happens.

What frosting is used for vintage cakes? ›

Make a Lot of Buttercream.

This was for assembling, filling, crumb coating, frosting, and piping the cake. There are few things more frustrating than running out of frosting in the middle of piping and having to drop everything to make more. So make a little more than you think you'll need!

In the 1700s, there was no baking soda or baking powder. To get their cakes to rise, cooks of that time had to use a branch from a peach tree - "they were very specific about using a peach branch," Kornblum said - to whip either egg yolks for about 15 minutes or egg whites for a full hour.

in 1927 by Harry Baker, an insurance man turned. caterer. He kept the recipe secret for 20 years until he.

There are a few theories as to how it got its name. One, it's the decadent counterpart to angel food cake. Two, it's sinfully delicious. Finally, devil's food cake came about during a time when food that was spicy, rich, or dark was described as deviled, like deviled ham and deviled eggs.

Depression Cake, also known as Wacky Cake or War Cake (among other names), originated in the Great Depression. It is a cake made without milk, eggs, or butter. These were all ingredients that were hard to come by during the Great Depression and at wartime.

Celery soup mixed with tuna fish and mashed potatoes. A salad of corned beef, gelatin and canned peas. Baked onion stuffed with peanut butter. Those are just some of the recipes Americans turned to during the Great Depression, when many families struggled to eat enough nutritious food.

The cakes are usually filled with allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger or other sweet spices, raisins or currants, and before baking are topped with the mark of a cross to signify that these were alms.

As it turns out though, some cakes were designed to fall. While browsing Reddit, I recently stumbled upon a vintage recipe called "Sad Cake." The recipe get its name because the cake rises in the oven and then when you take it out, it cools and falls down right in front of your eyes.

In 17th century England and New England, it was believed that a "witch's cake" had the power to reveal whether witchcraft was afflicting a person with symptoms of illness. Such a cake or biscuit was made with rye flour and the urine of the afflicted person. The cake was then fed to a dog.