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Preheat the oven to fan 140C/conventional 160C/ gas 3. Break the chocolate in pieces into a medium, heavy-based pan. Tip in the butter, then mix the coffee granules into 125ml/4fl oz cold water and pour into the pan. Warm through over a low heat just until everything is melted - don't overheat. Or melt in the microwave on Medium for about 5 minutes, stirring half way through. Trench cake, a home-made fruit cake has its roots in the kitchens of the First World War.
Now it appears that the postage cost of sending a cake up to 7lbs was 1 shilling and 4 pence but if the cake was above 7lbs it cost 1 shilling and 7 pence. Although a British ‘invention’ Trench cake has spread across the Atlantic to the US and become a staple for preppers.
Modified Trench Cake Recipe
Add milk, vinegar and soda mix to the dry ingredients and stir well. Once I married wherever we moved it was all about planting food, keeping chickens and ducks, permaculture and creating micro-climates. I learned how to build wooden cabins and outdoor furniture from pallets, and baked and cooked home-grown produce, developing recipes as I went along. This is the basic Trench cake recipe, which makes a cake weighing just over a pound. Housewives would have made 6 times the amounts given below to make a close to 7 lb cake, like the one Lt. Lamb received, in order to get their value out of the postage charged. Women at home had very little in the way of rations, and made do with what they had available in order to send a fruit cake for their husbands, sons, or boyfriends fighting on the various fronts.
Hmm… I guess the vinegar and soda were supposed to react to make bubbles and cause the cake to rise, but in my case it just led to a jug of funky smelling liquid after I mixed it with the milk. I added all the ingredients together and baked it at 180 degrees for 1 and a half hours. The recipe called for it to bake for 2 hours, but after 1 and a half the edges had started to burn and it was most definitely cooked through.
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War had ravaged Europe and to keep up the morale of troops fighting for King and country, women sent parcels to those fighting on the front line. These parcels provided a taste of something from home, away from the endless tins of bully beef, Maconchies stew and dry biscuits - a staple of trench food throughout the war years. Add the flour and margarine into a mixing bowl. Using your fingers, gently rub together the flour and margarine until they have the appearance of fine breadcrumbs.
During the First World War people in Britain would bake and post a fruit cake to loved ones on the front line. Some traditional cake ingredients were hard to come by. Can you imagine how wonderful a homemade cake would be after eating mostly canned food, stale bread, and super-processed beef for a long period of time? Despite war time rations that meant that sometimes families went to bed hungry and luxury food items being tough to lay hands on, British women came up with a way to make a tasty cake from what was available to them.
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Granny Eliza (as I'm calling her) was born in 1878, married George and had six children, including my great-granny Barbara, or Grandmam as I knew her. All the children were born between 1910 and 1921 – Grandmam herself born in 1916, just two years into the war, so it seemed fitting that I use this bowl, which was itself in ‘active service’ during the war years to make the trench cake. That, or hiding under the tables if Robbie and Finn decide to tell me, their commanding officer, to ‘do one’ and use it as a missile instead. It’s astounding that in the depths of war, the Post Office still managed to deliver 12 million parcels and letters every week to men at the Western Front. We agreed (yet again!) that none of us knew what we’d really do if faced with similar circumstances to the men who fought in the trenches of World War One.
While the fruit cools, line a deep baking tin with baking parchment paper. Bring the paper to ½ inch above the edge of the tin. Barbed wire is chocolate sprayed with edible silver. Add the milk/vinegar/bicarb mix to the dry ingredients and mix well to form a thick batter. Add dry ingredients to the flour and margarine.
Making one of these cakes is a great way to help children understand the sacrifices people made in war and to always remember those who lost their lives in all the wars in our country’s history. Looking back at times gone by has the potential to keep us from repeating the mistakes of our past. The British government actually suggested to parents and educators several years ago that they make these cakes with kids to help their students understand and remember the sacrifices made. These ingredients have been translated over from original British trench cake recipes to American units of measurement to help save you some time. During the Great War, trench cakes, like the one I’ll show you how to make, were made from a family’s rations to be sent out to the front lines for their soldiers.
First impressions were that if it didn’t taste great it could at least serve as a back up weapon, maybe a bludgeon or missile, in a tight spot. It was very, very dense and very, very dry. If I was sending this cake today it would have cost me over £5 to get it to France and I would also have to label it in capital letters “PERISHABLE”, which might have been one ironic morale booster too far for front line troops. Tip the dry ingredients into the saucepan with the fruit and mix well.
Touch device users, explore by touch or with swipe gestures. Chances are, you have most if not all the ingredients you need already at home to make one of these cakes. They were simply made, put together like many other basic cake recipes out there, then wrapped in brown paper and shipped off to the troops. It’s likely that many ingredients were substituted based on what was available at the time. For instance, the brown sugar in this recipe was likely hard for most families to come by, even though it is a small amount. Governments suggested that people substituted sugar syrups like molasses and honey in lieu of granulated sugar because it was so rare and needed for the war effort.
There are only 5 fruitcakes in the world. LOL They keep getting passed around and repassed. Tried the recipe by the steps shown.
The recipe for this World War One Trench Cake shows how truly inventive people had become in the name of morale-lifting home-baked treats. It was designed with a specific purpose – to be sent by post to the soldiers fighting in the trenches. What can preppers or survivalists learn from old timey recipes like this one for trench cake, you might be asking yourself. First off, becoming familiar with recipes like this one, which has no real fresh ingredients at all, can help you learn to live out of your preps. It can teach you to substitute the foods you eat now for foods you’d be able to make out of your pantry alone. Add in vinegar, baking soda, and milk together and mix quickly into the margarine/dry ingredients mixture.
Yes, all three went into the boozy fruit that had to be soaked for three days before being incorporated with the other ingredients before being baked, but that’s another story. The original recipe recommends leaving the cake to bake for two hours which may be a bit long. During the war, hens’ eggs in Britain were expected to be sent to hospitals for the wounded soldiers rather than consumed at home, but there must have been a few eggs that went into cakes that were sent across the English Channel. Cake & the history you include.
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