Welcome friends. It's Sunday so we're doing another one of our post depression
pre World War two recipes from the 1939 Elmvale community cook book and today
we're gonna do a sour cream cake recipe that was submitted by Mrs. Robert Bell and as
you can see this is a recipe that is pretty much just a list of ingredients
and nothing else. This is this of course another one of those recipes
where you actually need to know how to cook before you can tackle it, or at
least know how to do things. So when I look at a recipe like this I look at it
and say the ingredients are given in the order that you should probably use them.
And that's something that a lot of recipes today aren't written in that
intuitive manner. Recipe writers today feel that they need to put the most
important ingredients at the top and not necessarily the ingredients that you're
going to start with at the top. So into this bowl were a couple of eggs and
some sugar and I'm just gonna whisk that together to get it started.
Moisten the sugar and then next in is a cup of thick sour cream and I think
that's important as well. You want to have sour cream that is as natural as
possible, sour cream that only has a couple of ingredients, and if it's a no
fat sour cream it's not really sour cream.
Sorry it just isn't. So we'll whisk that in.
Great so I'm done with the whisk and we'll just get rid of that. Next in:
Raisins and currants. So we'll put both of those in. I find it
odd that it calls for both raisins and currants, since currants are just
corinthian raisins. A lot of people don't know that, they confuse the dried fruit
currants with the berry or the red fruit or the red currant or the black currant.
Two completely different things. And usually in a recipe like this one, it
calls for currants they're calling for the dried raisin type thing.
Next in is soda and we'll mix that in, and then it calls for flour to
make a batter. Doesn't say how much flour to make a batter, so I've got roughly two
cups of flour here. I'm gonna start with about 3/4 of a cup mix it in, and
see what happens. I'd say it needs some more so put in a little bit more keep
mixing so I think that batter looks pretty good. In the end we used about a
cup and a half of flour. So now we need to bake it and the instruction is baked
in a gem or a loaf pan. Now I don't have a gem pan, a gem pan refers to typically
a cast-iron pan kind of looks like a muffin tin except it's not round like
muffins. They came in two or three different shapes, a really heavy pan
quite an interesting thing. I should actually get one and we should make some
gems. Gem refers to the little cakes that you baked in it. So I'm gonna go and use
this loaf pan since it's what I have. Now just like last week it doesn't say
anything about time or temperature so I'm going to try 350F and I'm going to
keep a close eye on it so that it doesn't over bake.
All right Glen what have we made today? Sour cream cake for Mrs. Robert Bell
mmm-hmm what's a nice tea cake lovely yep mm-hmm
you know I'm kind of surprised but how many of these cakes have raisins or
dates like what is it about raisins and dates?
did they store really well? They would yes, they store dry.
You could get them all year round yeah because there's no other flavour in
this there's no vanilla, it's just raisins...
...and currants, which are raisins. so sour cream and sour cream yeah but I mean
there's no there's no vanilla there's no but it doesn't need it
no there's the thing it doesn't. Things don't need to be that complicated. No it
is an incredibly simple cake like I would... You ready? why I don't know usually
"I would" mean something big bold statement... So we did that three and
five ingredient Nutella recipe. Okay yeah. I would take this flavour-wise
texture-wise any day of the week over those two and this is as easy
or easier than... Six things six six ingredients and there's six ingredients
that you would always have in your cupboard, and if you don't have currants
just use all raisins because they're raisins. So you need down to five
ingredients and it's really simple just to mix it together of course I will tell
you some of the details on the details that aren't in the recipe like defining
what a gem pan is yep. A little butter improves this cake
I guess you add the butter? No you slather the butter on the outside as you
eat it. Oh sorry. Yes Oh butter always goes well with tea
cake. yes yes okay so this is a pretty good recipe thanks for stopping by see
you guys soon!