welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
in the old cookbook show today we're
going to make a cake
now
every once in a while i come across
recipes in these older cookbooks
um that even though they're from you
know days long gone by the one we're
going to make today is from
1889
it is the kind of cake that i believe
has a place in
2022 it's
simple doesn't use a lot of ingredients
it seems like something that is very
fast to make
and once we get the
basics down
will be able to you can flavor it any
way you want and there's a whole bunch
of ways that you can make this cake
later and i've got these all going
through my head and i'm thinking
let's try the base cake as it's
presented in the ch eddie and company's
cookbook
um
brattleboro vermont from 1889 now ch id
and company
they made flavoring extracts uh things
like lemon bay rum
ginger extract vanilla extract those
sorts of things
and so
some of the recipes in this cookbook use
their extracts but a lot of them don't
and i think they were just hoping that
you would grab for their cookbook in the
kitchen with all of these other recipes
always see their name and then when you
went to the market you would buy their
products so we're going to make
something called a tea cake
i'm using a copper bowl you don't have
to use a copper bowl but i'm going to
whip up these two eggs
okay so we've got those two eggs pretty
frothy
now i'm going to add sugar
and continue
beating them together whipping them up
so it tells me to whip these until
they're very light and i think that is
very light we've got some really nice
texture there next ingredient is thick
sour cream so i'm supposed to put a cup
of thick sour cream
into the mix
and i'm supposed to add baking soda to
the sour cream
so i've got some pretty thick sour cream
here
hopefully i've got a cup yeah i've got a
cup okay
a cup of sour cream
and the baking soda
and i'll just start to mix
baking soda in
a lot of instructions in baking and
cooking are holdovers from earlier times
where things mattered a whole lot and
advances in
milling and chemistry and production and
quality control have changed
some of those things that they're not as
important anymore but they get you know
they get repeated over and over because
they were repeated to you and so you
just repeat them on to the next person
and on to the next person and on to the
next person
in the end um
in 2022 i think i could have just put
the sour cream
into
the eggs and then put the
uh baking soda into the eggs and then
whip them together and everything is
going to be fine so
whip those in
so i've got that whipped in now
i'm supposed to stir in
two cups of sifted flour
so
i've got the flour
i'm gonna put in maybe half to start
with
stir that in and then stir in the second
half
now we come to the flavorings and the
book
just says flavor however you want now
they're hoping
that you choose one of their flavorings
um
cheddy and companies flavorings are not
available to me
so you know we could do ginger we could
do bay rum you could do vanilla
lemon i mean you could do almond extract
if you want almond
i'm going to put in a little bit of
lemon
and i'm not sure how much
here's the thing this is why i think
this is a great cake
and we'll see
because the base the batter of the cake
is very prescriptive do these things and
you get a cake
the flavoring
is up to you the baker
oh it's not so good
it's up to you the baker and i think
that's something that's missing in a lot
of baking these
days we're told over and over and over
again
baking is a science it's an exact
formula you have to do exactly this or
it's not going to work out you're going
to have failure
and for the base cake there's still a
lot of leeway
but when it comes to flavoring
i do believe that you can flavor them
any way you want and so i'm going to put
that little bit of lemon in i might put
a little bit more bump it up a little
bit because i don't smell the lemon too
much
this could be any flavor and i think in
the future if the texture of this cake
works out what i want to do over the
next few weeks
is come back to this base cake
make it again and again
and flavor it completely differently or
use the batter completely differently
let's see what we come up with
so i've got a
got a 9x9 cake pan it's got a parchment
sling in the bottom i think the pan is
too big
again like many recipes from this time
period it doesn't say anything about the
size of the pan that you're supposed to
cook it in
we'll just spread this out
and into the oven
and it just says quick oven and no time
so i'll watch it pretty closely
okay so famous last words about watching
it closely i put it into
the oven the temperature that it told me
to
um and i set a timer for 20 minutes
figuring 20 minutes would work but
it probably only needed 15 minutes
what we have here explaining the edges
well what we have here is a weird little
cake puff
your
sorry
my friends i was kind of sidetracked by
glenn's story of whoa
and the puffiness of the cakes
um so this is called a tea cake it's
from an 1899 cookbook by ch eddie and
company and i'm i'm interested in this
cake because i think that there's other
things i can do with it so it's got some
really big those are some really big
holes yeah
i'm assuming due to its time there's not
a lot of sugar in it you seem to be
pretty excited i see your little dance
of joy okay
the interior is what i thought it was
going to be
inter so there's
there's no fat in this cake the only fat
in this cake comes from some sour cream
and there's a little bit of lemon
flavoring because it said the flavor
how you wanted to but it didn't say how
much or what to do
i have plans for this cake
i can see how it's a tea cake though
it's not super sweet not super sweet
it's uh
kind of spongy and soft it is very soft
even though it looks over
baked it is over baked
let me be clear it is overbaked by about
five minutes at that temperature
but it's not dried out it's not dried
out no it's still very soft inside isn't
okay so i have
come back to this channel
this coming saturday and i'm gonna use
this cake as a base
for something else it'll be really good
with like strawberry drizzle on top
yeah oh i i'm i'm i'm i'm am i giving
away your ideas no okay but yes
okay um
so pretty good cake pretty good base
this cake will accept lots of flavorings
see you next saturday thanks for
stopping by see you again soon
you