Sixties Recipes – Remember These?

Recipes from the SixtiesI’m so excited!  (And now you are about to find out how easy it is to get me excited!)

I have been working for some time on publishing a collection of sixties recipes – recipes that I remember from when I was a child.  These are gooooooooood recipes – the kind you go back to over and over again, and (sometimes) the kind your doctor fusses at you about!

But what’s really exciting is that I have found a couple of new plugins that are going to make entering these types of recipes much easier.  One plugin makes it easier to format and insert recipes….and the other  makes it easier to format and insert pictures!  It’s all good!

I thought – in order to test out the plugins and (incidentally) give you a sample of the recipe collection – I’d share one of my favorite cakes when I was a kid.  This one was shared with me by my Home Economics teacher (you do remember HomeEc, right?)  The great feature of this recipe is that you mix it all up in a pan – no beaters, no bowl, nothing gets dirty but a fork (and since it has no eggs, you can lick the fork – I won’t tell!).

Wacky Cake
 
Author: 
Recipe type: Dessert, Quick and Easy
Prep time: 
Cook time: 
Total time: 
This cake is one of those strange cakes that, I believe, was dreamed up by smart cooks during World War II, hence the name “Wacky Cake.” It retained its popularity all the way through my high school years in the sixties. Because many staple items (like eggs) were in short supply, resourceful cooks learned to bake without them. You will enjoy this delicious, eggless cake.
Ingredients
For the Cake:
  • 1½ C. flour
  • 1 C. sugar
  • 3 T. cocoa powder
  • 1 t. baking soda
  • ½ t. salt
  • 6 T. vegetable oil
  • 1 T. vinegar
  • 1 t. vanilla
  • 1 C. cold water
For the Frosting:
  • 1 stick butter
  • 4 T. cocoa
  • 1 lb. confectioner’s sugar
  • ⅓ C. milk
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • ½ C. pecans, chopped
Instructions
For the Cake:
  1. Preheat oven to 350°.
  2. Sift the dry ingredients together into a greased 8 X 8 inch baking pan. With the back of a spoon, make three depressions in the dry ingredients.
  3. Pour the vegetable oil into the first depression, the vinegar into the second depression, and the vanilla into the third depression. Carefully pour the water over the entire contents of the pan. Stir well with a fork, but don’t beat it – just stir. Make sure you have stirred in all the dry ingredients, and that the wet ingredients are well incorporated into the mixture.
  4. Bake for 30 minutes, watching carefully, or until the cake tests done.
For the Frosting:
  1. Place all ingredients except vanilla into a heavy-bottomed pan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Be sure to stir continually.
  2. Boil for one minute, stirring to make sure it doesn’t burn.
  3. Remove from heat and allow to cool normally to room temperature and stir in the vanilla.
  4. Pour over the Wacky Cake. It will be soft and runny, but oh-so-delicious.
  5. Sprinkle with pecans.
  6. You can place the entire thing in the refrigerator if you want it a little stiffer. I myself prefer the frosting to be soft and just slightly runny.

 

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