Wartime cake

[SorrySister]

DS's school is organising a VE Day picnic, and we've been asked to make a cake using ingredients that would have been available in the 1940s during WWII. Do you have any tried-and-tested recipes, either passed down in your family or found elsewhere, that work well without ingredients like eggs or large amounts of sugar?

Here you go OP. Relevant pages from "Cooking In Wartime" by Elizabeth Craig.

Thank you @moggerhanger

If this is a physical copy of the book, does it happen to include a chocolate based cake recipe by any chance?

WW2 chocolate cake https://vintagiouslife.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/ww2-ration-book-chocolate-cake/

I was going to suggest chocolate vinegar cake but @Londonmummy66 beat me to it 😊 (No such recipe in the book, due to even cocoa being scarce.)

Please don’t send in a chocolate cake. How does the teacher share that out quickly and fairly to a class, explain that that chocolate or cocoa were not readily available and deal with the complaints from other parents whose child has eaten chocolate that they are forbidden or been one of the ones who missed out on a slice?

Rations varied at different times of the year and generally got tighter by the end of the war and beyond. Not everything was available all the while - these are maximums that could be purchased - but could have been supplemented by whatever a family could grow.

The amounts given below are for one person, but you'd be combining the rations of everyone in the household to feed a family, meaning a cake is a perfectly reasonable option, but sweetened with jam or fruit rather than chocolate.

• Meat: 113g per week.
• Bacon and Ham: 113g per week.
• Eggs: 3 per week.
• Butter: 57g per week.
• Margarine: 113g per week.
• Cooking Fat: 57g per week.
• Cheese: 28g per week.
• Milk: 3.5 pints per week (plus milk at school).
• Tea: None.
• Sugar: 227g per week.
• Jam: 57g per week.
• Sweets: 71g per week.

Flour was rationed at times but not consistently until after the war so I’d assume you've got that.

@SnowdaySewday There'll be plenty of cakes, as several parents are planning to send something in and cake was specifically requested by the school. The rations you listed really give food for thought (no pun intended). Those were undeniably hard times for everyone, and it's a stark reminder to be grateful for what we have today. That said, I’m also mindful that, sadly, many still or rather again face hardship due to the cost of living, rising inequality and poverty.

Wartime rationing and other measures like making school and workplace meals available and the “British Restaurants” scheme meant a basically healthy diet was available across the population, and the energy-dense foods were required for the physically more active lifestyle of the time. Children after the war were physically taller and healthier on average compared with before.

Cake was a significant part of the diet, which can be surprising as the modern perception may be of spam sandwiches or boiled bacon and cabbage. Chocolate and other items (bananas would be another example) which had to be imported were expensive and limited in supply, and making a palatable chocolate cake with 1940s cocoa would take an awful lot more of the family's sugar ration than making a pleasant jam sponge sandwich, tea loaf or rock cakes.

@SnowdaySewday my mum was born in 1934 and remembered rationing. Especially chocolate cake! Made with carefully saved cocoa rations, which has a drying effect on the sponge itself, particularly when made with minimal butter. She recalled going to a kid's party, where a chocolate birthday cake was served to great fanfare. The cake was dry and dense and she couldn't masticate it enough to swallow it. Fearful of being told off for leaving such an important treat, she hid it up her elasticated knicker leg, and escaped to the loo. Except the cake blocked the U-bend and refused to flush! She said she hadn't been fond of chocolate cake ever since.

Not easy for school but apparently crumble was “invented” during the war because it was quick, involved margarine and home grown or foraged fruit.

I actually find the wartime scone recipe (replacing half the butter with lard) to be superior to the all-butter version. Lighter and richer.

@moggerhanger - does your book have a recipe for saucepan cake please?

Silly idea: unnecessary work for parents (compared with normal baking) and the cakes won’t be that nice.

Loads on YouTube, most saying how bad the cakes, biscuits etc are compared to every other era!

I’d just make a normal ‘basic’ type bake.

Send in rock cakes.

💯
I made a wartime vinegar cake, no eggs, very little sugar, and just enough margarine to hold it together. It looked ok questionable, and based on the bits that got stuck in the tin, it wasn’t exactly promising. DS tried a piece at school and didn’t like it. He said the other mums had sent in shop-bought cakes or Mr Kipling that actually tasted good 😂

Apologies, only just seen this. The pages I photographed are all that there were on cakes in the book! There was plenty else, often including tripe 🤢