Saturday, February 15, 2025

Egg-Free Cake: or, The time is right

Who would have thought that eggs would disappear from grocery stores? 

Eggless Cake
½ c shortening*
1½ c sugar
1 tsp soda
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
3 c flour
1 c sour milk or buttermilk
1 c firmly packed raisins

Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour two 8" round cake pans.
Chop the raisins, or put them in a cup and have at them with scissors, stirring them as you go so they all get snipped.
Cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking soda, mix well. Add the flour one cup at a time, alternating with the milk ½ cup at a time. Mix thoroughly after every addition. Stir in the raisins, being sure to break up any clumps.
Bake for about 30 minutes, or until it springs back in the center when lightly pressed.

*A lot of recipes from this time use the word shortening to refer to any solid fat. So if you prefer to use margarine or butter, go right ahead.

Good Things to Eat, Rufus Estes, 1911

Only a few weeks ago, the very idea of an egg shortage seemed as preposterous as running out of toilet paper did before the pandemic. Eggs were always there, just like the flour and the canned corn. But these days, a movie scene like this hits a little different.

The Stepford Wives, 2004

As eggs get scarcer, we at A Book of Cookrye would like to share a cake recipe that doesn't use any. Of course, we can offer the War Cake, which also contains no dairy. We also have a one-egg cake, for those who want to make a single egg work for an entire birthday-sized layer cake. But today, we are making the eggless cake from Good Things To Eat As Suggested By Rufus

Because we already had sour cream in the refrigerator, we used it instead of buttermilk. It made the cake batter almost like cookie dough.  

Of course, having been here before, we know that this recipe will make a perfectly good cake if you put it in a cake pan and then bake it like a normal person would. If you look past the low-quality picture from when last we wrote about it, you can see that baking it as directed results in a very lovely cake.

But today, in order to give the oven a bit of rest, I'm putting the cake batter onto this Soviet waffle iron that landed in the kitchen.

cake batter waffles on a soviet waffle maker
Reminder: The cake batter is egg-free. There's nothing timely about this cookware at all.

I knew the cake would be good because it was the last time I made it. And it looks really cute coming out of a waffle iron. 


I'll admit it makes a better cake than waffles, but that's why the cookbook writer told us to bake it in the oven and not on a waffle iron. 

In closing, this is a great cake for saving eggs. It's old-fashioned and a lot firmer than what we're used to today. But it doesn't taste like you tried to bake with ingredients you didn't have. It is very good on its own.



1 comment:

  1. Oh for the days when eggs made a cheap, easy meal. Now if I indulge in eating a couple of eggs, I scramble them really well and drizzle them in boiling broth. That way I have an entire bowl of eggs without it being an entire bowl of eggs. Soon we'll all be looking for recipes that don't require any ingredients.
    Too bad the waffle version wasn't as good. I'm all in favor of cooking methods that don't heat the house up in the summer.

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