Wednesday, April 9, 2014

American History "Great Depression Era" Cake

As we have been working through the 20th century, we studied quite a bit about the Depression Era, and the accompanying hardships that it brought to Americans.

As a food allergy family, we are already used to cooking 'without' many ingredients that most people would deem absolutely necessary to making a cake taste palatable, but this cooking challenge was a little different. Instead, we pretended that we were a family with very limited resources during the Great Depression, and Melissa baked a cake that was "eggless, milkless, and butterless" without using ANY of our regular substitutes for those particular ingredients.

We found a vintage "Great Depression" Cake on Pinterest, from a blog called "Blissfully Content", and used that particular recipe. The author also has some other fun recipes on there for stew and corn bread!

Melissa made the cake using these simple ingredients: water, cinnamon, cloves, brown sugar, shortening (lard), nutmeg, salt, flour, baking soda, and baking powder. The recipe did call for raisins, but since Melissa was the baker and she doesn't like them cooked into her food, she omitted them. She just pretended that the family having this particular cake did not even have raisins available to add to their baking!

This cake tastes a lot like spice cake, and was very tasty for not having any eggs or butter in it! It is a fun and easy recipe, and really brings home the idea of "doing without" like so many were forced to do during the Great Depression.

Melissa used two separate pans and made small cakes - one in a round, mini bundt pan, and the other in a mini loaf pan.





This post is linked with a nice collection of ideas to spend time cooking with your kids 

Cooking with Kids



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