Cockeyed Cake

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This cake has many names, I know of cockeyed cake, wacky cake, and crazy cake. It has no eggs, and I suspect it could have been a depression or war cake.

Any mother who wants to teach her children how to make cake from scratch needs to have this recipe. It is practically impossible to fail. Though once my daughters forgot the vanilla and they felt that that was a failure. This cake batter can be made into just about any type cake, like layered, bundt, or cupcakes. The page in the book that my children used for this recipe looks like a war zone. They must have spilled most of the ingredients on it at one time or another.

2 cups flour (9 ounces)
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1/s tsp salt

1/3 cup cooking oil
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/3 cups cold water

Preheat the oven to 350.
Grease and flour what pan you are going to use, or put muffin papers into the cupcake pan.
Combine the dry ingredients in a big bowl.
Add the wet ingredients and stir well, but don't stir to death or the baking soda will be spent.
Bake until the cake springs back to the touch,
This is about 15 minutes for cupcakes, and longer for layers or bundt.

When cooled it can be nice to frost cupcakes.

Vanilla Butter-cream

1 cup icing sugar
1/4 cup soft butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 pinch of cinnamon
enough cream (or milk) to make a good consistency

Put the icing sugar and butter into a bowl and mix with a hand mixer until the sugar looks nice and yellow.
Add the vanilla, cinnamon and about 1 tablespoon of cream for starters.
Whip up very thoroughly, and add more cream a very little at a time to make a good spreading consistency.
You can also add cocoa powder to this icing, just sift it first, as the lumps will not taste good.

Another way to eat this cake that children really like is to make very small cup cakes and serve them with a very big bowl of whipped cream that the children can apply to the cupcakes themselves.

If you make a bundt cake, and we like to make two smaller bundt cakes, you can dust the cake(s) with icing sugar.

Also, this cake can easily be make bigger or smaller because there are no eggs in the recipe, so no math problems.