Making Firecake! (Revised)

Hey everyone! In this entry, I will be going over and talking about changes that I would have liked to make when I cooked Firecake.

After doing extensive research of the many types of food cooked during the Revolutionary War, I decided to make Firecake, a food eaten by Colonial soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Very simple to make, this Firecake only had 2, sometimes 3 components: water, flour, and sometimes salt.

Choosing the ingredients was fairly easy - but I forgot an extremely important part: oil! This caused my end result to be very soggy and still "doughy". Additionally, baking soda would have been very helpful.

Ingredients: I made my Firecake with ingredients as close as possible to those originally used.

> Flour

>Water

>Salt

When I first started working on the fire, I thought it would be pretty easy! It turns out I was very, very wrong. I ended up having to use a torch to even get anything on fire! I probably should have at least used a grill pit of some sort - the wind basically put out every fire I made.

There is no specific measurement of each ingredient as the only requirement is that the Firecake is thick and damp before you cook it. I also made a small fire in my backyard to cook it on top of.

I should have known that the Firecakes wouldn't cook all the way through if the batter was almost liquid, but I went with it anyway! An improvement I could have made is to use a bit more flour or possibly baking soda and oil.

1. Mix together the ingredients until you get a texture close to mashed potatoes.

The bottom line here is that I should have used a pan of some sort. I didn't even wash the rocks! All in all, my idea of cooking the Firecake on top of the rocks didn't work out very well.

2. Place on hot rocks to cook.

I probably should not have eaten this afterwards, considering the health hazards. In retrospect, it would have been better to try and cook the Firecake inside of an oven. As you can see, it came out almost gooey. If I had cooked it in an oven, it should have come out like a hard biscuit.

3. Eat when the dough is cooked!

I learned a lot about what kind of conditions the Colonial soldiers had to go through while researching about Firecake, especially their diet. Seeing what the soldiers had to eat to survive gave me a big wakeup call on how much easier it is for us to find a suitable meal. 

I'll admit... that was not the most exciting thing I have eaten in my life. It really, really does not taste great and makes you smell like smoke afterwards! The main reason this food was made so quickly is because the Colonial soldiers were constantly moving around, they were forced to create a food that would last a long time. However, it is still interesting to see what Colonial soldiers ate in the past.