Madeira Cake

I have always enjoyed baking and I was hopeful that dried egg would have a real use in baking. The ‘powdered egg’ meals really will have had to be reserved for desperate times. I still haven’t finished all of them, but I am taking a little break before I try the bacon and egg pie. However, baking must have been a challenge on rations. The principle key elements of cake making are fat, sugar and eggs all of which were rationed. This must have made cake making the reserve for special occasions, if at all. 

At first glance at the recommended recipe, I could tell this was not going to have the consistency of a ‘normal’ cake. Firstly, this was going to be a dense batter, due to the small amount of fat and sugar to flour ratio. Secondly, there was not a lot of moisture in the recipe. Using powdered eggs, means that you are losing quite a lot from the egg whites and due to the low fat content I could not picture how this would turn out. The recipe also calls for ‘National Flour.’

Nation Flour was the name given to the 85% extraction flour which was introduced in the UK in February 1941, it was later called wheatmeal flour and then production discontinued in 1956. Now, it took me a month to get hold of powdered egg, so finding ‘National Flour’ was probably not going to be an option, so I decided to go with all purpose.

I followed the recipe exactly, however the consistency was so thick that my poor mixer could have used the dough hook (this may be rationing, but I'm still using my modern appliances). To resolve this I went my own way and thinned down the consistency with milk. The baking time also seemed a little excessive of 1 ½ to 2 hours in a moderate oven? I only baked this for ½ an hour as I would with most sponges of this size in a 23 cm tin. If I had cooked this in a loaf tin, I would have increased this to 50 minutes but not much longer.

Once cooled, I chiselled out the Madeira cake from the tin and although it wasn’t the best cake I have ever made, it was not unpleasant at all. Due to the thickness of the mixture it pretty much tasted of scone (one big giant scone). However, cut into slices, you could quite happily eat this with Jam, butter or cream (like a scone) and it is so stodgy that it would keep you going for ever!