Bread Cake
Three cups light dough, two cups sugar, one cup butter, three eggs, one teaspoon soda, one pound seeded and chopped raisins, a little nutmeg; let it stand a little while before baking.
A bread-dough cake: risen white bread dough enriched with butter, sugar, eggs and fruit, then given a second rise before baking. The original assumes a household with dough already working on the back of the stove, so most of what needs saying is how to get to that starting point and how to handle the mixing.
- "Light dough"This means ordinary white bread dough that has risen once and is puffy and full of gas — not batter and not unrisen dough. Three cups is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of dough. If you are not baking bread that day, make a plain lean dough (about 3 cups flour, 1 cup water, 2 tsp yeast, 1 1/2 tsp salt), let it double, and use the whole batch.
- The hinge: work the fat in thoroughlyButter, sugar and eggs beaten into risen dough will look curdled and hopeless for several minutes. Keep working — a stand mixer with the paddle, or hands in a wide bowl — until the mass is uniform. Stopping early gives streaks of greasy dough and a heavy crumb.
- Soda in a yeast cakeThe teaspoon of soda is not the main leavening; it neutralises the sourness of dough that has risen long and hard, and gives a little extra lift. Use baking soda, sift or dissolve it so it does not leave bitter spots, and do not increase it.
- "Let it stand a little while"This is the second rise, and it is the step most likely to be short-changed. Fill the pans about half full and leave in a warm place 45 to 90 minutes, until visibly swollen — the sugar and butter slow the yeast considerably.
- OvenBake at 350F. A cake this rich and heavy with fruit takes 50 to 70 minutes in a loaf pan; cover the top with foil if it colours before the centre sets. A skewer should come out clean and the internal temperature should read about 200F.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" here means the seeds have been removed, which was laborious work before seedless varieties were standard. Modern raisins are already seedless; a pound is about 3 cups. Chopping still matters, as whole raisins sink and tear the crumb.
- Butter and sugarOne cup of butter is two sticks, 8 oz, and should be soft rather than melted. Two cups of sugar is generous by modern taste for this quantity of dough; 1 1/2 cups makes a less cloying cake without affecting structure.
- Nutmeg and yield"A little nutmeg" is about half a teaspoon, freshly grated. This is a large batch; expect it to need two or more 8x4 inch loaf pans, or one large tube pan, and it slices best the day after baking.
Bread cake belongs to a long tradition of using the day's bread dough as the base for something sweet — the same thinking behind the German and Alsatian yeast kuchen, Italian panettone and the older English enriched doughs that eventually became fruit buns. In American household books of the later nineteenth century the form appears constantly, because home bread-making was routine and taking a lump from the trough cost nothing but the butter and sugar added to it. The soda is a marker of its date: chemical leavening was becoming widely available by the 1870s, and it was apparently added to yeast batters as insurance and as a corrective for the sour edge of a slow rise. The New England raised cake known as "election cake" is a related version of the same idea.