Eggless Cake Pt. 2: Success!

    Yesterday I wrote of my kitchen disaster with an eggless cake recipe from the "land before time". Okay, just kidding, but I did some further investigating and found out that my honey cook book was put out in 1919! Even earlier than I thought.

    As to the cake nightmare, the cards were stacked against me. I actually found this notation in the cook book: "Practically all of the recipes in this booklet have been thoroughly tested." Well, heck! It would be just my luck to pick a recipe that had been only slightly tested!

    Well, as you know I intended to do everything I did on the first tryout, only use a Bundt pan instead of a loaf pan. This I did. I threw everything together like an old pro and popped it in the oven.  Twenty minutes passed, not even close. Thirty minutes passed, nope, now I'm starting to worry. At forty minutes time I took the cake out. It looked beautiful: a deep golden color. It smelled good:  But, the toothpick did not come out completely clean. My hopes sank to the floor. Nevertheless, I put the pan on the rack to cool and went to watch my t.v. show (I Spy, again). 

    When the cake had cooled enough to remove it from the pan it was a beautiful sight to behold. Just the right color and texture. After a bit I cut a slice for myself and my aunt. It was good! The inside was not raw, but moist and the outside was perfect. I let out the breath I was holding and cut myself another slim slice!

Victory is mine! Guess what I am having as an afternoon snack? No guesswork.

    Now I feel I can move on with my head held high. 

    If you are interested in some more honey info, here are some more notes from the booklet:

• Honey is "nature's sweet" and "is as pure and wholesome as mountain air and a real food that any stomach will welcome".
• "Baked goods, and, in fact, foods of any kind prepared with honey, keep better than if prepared with sugar. It is well known by scientists that honey, in a sense, is a preservative.Fruit put up with honey not only keeps better, but the color is brighter, and cakes and cookies are less likely to grow musty." (I do hate having to brush the must off my cookies).
• Honey is pure, "without an untruth hidden in it". (Unlike those lying sacks of sugar!)
• Honey "imparts that waxy quality to cakes that makes them so delicious" Waxy? Really?
• "It's flavor will take your memory back to shady lanes and clover-studded fields- to June and the drone of bees"... (and the fleeing and the stinging and the screaming).
• Honey is "immediately absorbed into the blood". (How is this a bonus? I don't want to imagine my blood thickly infused with honey. I figure my blood is just barely chugging along on a good day.)

    Lastly, I know I have complained about the lack of specifics listed in the recipe; oven temp, cooking time, etc. but as I was perusing the other recipes I saw ingredient quantities listed as: one coffee cupful of this, or two coffee cupfuls of that. How much is that? Did everybody have standard-sized coffee cups back then? At least I didn't pick one of those! In some cases the editors did give you an idea of required oven temp by stating "put cake in quick oven". I couldn't remember, myself just how hot that was supposed to be so I looked it up online. It is a 400 degree oven. While I was looking this up I came upon an inquiry from some poor fool who had an old cookbook she wanted to use and she wanted to know where she could purchase a "Quick Oven"! So sad. Well, at least there's one dingleberry out there who knows less about cooking than I do!