Vintage Recipe Roulette: Rationing-era Halloween Cake

A sticky, batty, and Spry cake from a very different time...or was it?

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the colors, I love the spookiness, I love the candy, and most of all, I love the horrible, horrible vintage recipes. I’ll get to today’s vintage recipe in a minute, but first I have to show you some of my favorite ads and food photography of yesteryear.

This one from Karo Syrup (and the 80s) makes ugly a feature, not a bug.

And this 1958 one, from a delightful old Flickr collection called Charm and Poise, features (sea) bugs as an ingredient.

But, this might be my favorite (except for the undisputed worst guac, ham, Worcestershire and donut Goblin Sandwich I covered last year) — the Weeny Witch. I would kill for a copy of the Cudahy Packing Company’s Puritan Franks Weeny Witch Party Book, which is chock full of vague menu suggestions and surprisingly terrifying cut out masks.

They want you to dress up their hot dogs in hilariously elaborate little paper costumes. How annoying, I thought at first, that you would have to remove your weenie’s paper goblin costume before consuming…but they want you to decorate these with shoe-polish coated pipe cleaners, so you definitely should not be consuming them after costuming them.

I thought about making a weenie witch, I really did, but I still haven’t recovered from the Frankfurter Scallop from installments past, and there’s something about this Halloween that feels…fragile? Thin? Like butter scraped over too much bread…

It brought to mind this World War II era cake, from when sugar was rationed and desserts were a much rarer luxury. This one is from a defunct shortening brand called Spry, and its main selling point is that it only uses 7/8 of a cup of sugar.

It cheats a little by also using corn syrup, but it does look like a thrifty cake, shorter than usual on both flour and sugar. Even the icing is made out of almost nothing — more corn syrup, an egg white, and a little cream of tartar.

Even if it’s bad, it’s gotta be better than the partial recipe at the bottom — “WORK WONDERS with 1 LB. LIVER”. And there’s something about looking at these little scraps of history, from a time when we pulled together a little more, when there was a growing awareness that women could do jobs that were closed to them before, and a growing national investment in basic human rights for marginalized peoples. Eighty years ago now, and still so much farther to go…

So I’m gonna make this cake. Spry doesn’t exist any more, but it was a vegetable shortening not unlike the vegan butter I already have. I usually avoid corn syrup like the plague, but I just bought some so I can make Alton Brown’s homemade candy corn, might as well use it for this historical re-enactment. This particular, somewhat curious icing probably would not work with a substitute like honey or maple, and anyway, I really want to honor the story the ingredients are telling here.

Spry’s main story is that you can make this cake in one bowl, without creaming the butter and sugar together. I’m skeptical, and it is important to understand that the vegetable shortening has to be at room temp and very soft to work, but I’m gonna give it a shot. I’m even hand whisking instead of using the mixer, because it’s as close as I can get to one of those 40s hand-cranked beaters.

I am indeed using cake flour, which is good, because the lower gluten should help prevent it from getting tough as I whisk the batter several hundred times. The shortening does indeed blend right in, much to my surprise. It looks kind of like brownie batter until I add the eggs and the last of the milk, and then it’s just a silky smooth cake batter.

I’m using a 9x13 pan to make two rectangular layers since I only have one round cake pan after the oven storage drawer ate one of my silicone ones. I was a little worried about the relatively small amount of batter, but it baked up just beautifully, perfectly flat and just right for decorating.

Now for the frosting. I have never made anything like this, the bastard child of Swiss meringue and a wayward marshmallow, and I’m quite worried about it. You beat corn syrup, just a tad of sugar, an egg white, and cream of tartar over a double boiler until it’s all peaky. Such a setup can go hideously, terribly wrong (scrambled egg icing), but it worked great. It doesn’t make a whole lot, but that’s to be expected with this kind of lean times recipe.

I have to warn you, although it’s shiny and beautiful, this icing is very very very sticky. Like, a pine tree fell into a glue stick factory sticky. Stickier than two sticks at a stick-shaking convention. It also doesn’t have much flavor. You really might as well just stir orange food coloring into a jar of Marshmallow Fluff. I could wax poetic about Marshmallow Fluff (and I have), but I don’t really want this much of it on what I hope will be a perfectly good cake, and my husband is vehemently opposed. I added a couple of ounces of Neufchatel cheese with the mixer to make sure it was incorporated, and it was much improved, but still with its essential pillowy and mild character.

I layered it up and left the sides un-iced as shown. The recipe doesn’t give decorating instructions, so I used a bat stencil and cocoa powder to gussy mine up. (Doesn’t the stencil stick to the icing? Yes. Yes it does. Just accept this.)

It has a very tender, fluffy crumb, and I actually love the reduced sweetness — I often think sheet cakes are far too sugary. I loved the mixing method, too, especially for a flat decorating surface as opposed to a tall, craggy muffin. It just worked beautifully. If I make it again, I’ll use maple syrup instead of corn syrup, and probably an easier, less bastardy frosting recipe — buttercream or cream cheese would be great.

I often look at modern, food fad recipes that are all over TikTok and Instagram these days, and wonder what they will look like to us in 50 or 100 years. I think people will be shocked at the combination of excess and restriction. There are thousands of dessert recipes dripping with sugar-free caramel and expensive nut flours, huge steaks with butter, clickbait giant aluminum pans filled with entire blocks of cream cheese and pre-cooked chicken and 3 kinds of seasoning salt totally untethered to any tradition. The comments are full of people laying out their food rules in black and white, no room for moderation, no voice for the most important function of food…

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