Home › Breakfast › Breakfast Coffee Cakes
Breakfast Coffee Cakes
One cup of sweet milk, one and one half cup sugar, two thirds of a cup of butter, three well beaten eggs, three teaspoons of baking powder worked into enough flour to make a stiff dough; roll out thin, and sift ground cinnamon on the sheet; roll up into a roll and cut off slices from one end, place the slices in tins to bake, with sugar sprinkled on each slice. Bake until brown. IO
A baking-powder dough rolled with cinnamon and cut into pinwheels — essentially cinnamon rolls without the yeast or the overnight wait. The original leaves out both the flour quantity and the oven heat, so those are the two things to settle before you start.
- Flour, unspecified"Enough flour to make a stiff dough" with this much liquid, fat and egg lands around 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose. Work in the last cup gradually; the dough should be rollable and only slightly tacky, closer to a rich biscuit dough than a bread dough.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Bake at 375F, which browns the sugar on top before the centres dry out. "Bake until brown" is roughly 18 to 22 minutes for slices about an inch thick.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes called for with saleratus. Whole milk is the right substitution.
- Don't overwork itThis is the hinge. Baking powder doughs toughen with kneading, so mix only until the flour disappears, then roll once. A re-rolled, over-handled dough gives hard, bready slices instead of tender ones.
- Rolling and cutting"Roll out thin" means about 1/4 inch. The recipe sifts the cinnamon straight onto the sheet; brushing first with a little softened butter helps it adhere. Cut the slices about an inch thick with a sharp knife or a length of thread.
- TinsSet the slices cut side up with a small gap between them on a greased sheet pan, or pack them touching in a round cake tin if you want soft sides. Sprinkle the tops with sugar as directed just before they go in.
- SweetnessA cup and a half of sugar in the dough is generous by current taste, and there is more sugar on top. Reducing the dough sugar to a cup gives a result closer to a modern coffee cake, though the slices will be a little less tender and brown less readily.
- YieldAbout two dozen slices. They are best the day they are baked; the eggs and butter keep them from going stale immediately, but by the second day they want warming.
"Coffee cake" in an American community cookbook of this period means a sweet cake eaten with coffee rather than one containing it, a usage generally traced to the German Kaffeekuchen brought over by nineteenth-century immigrants. The older versions were yeast-raised and needed a sponge set the night before; what makes this one a breakfast recipe is chemical leavening, which by the late 1800s had made baking powder cheap and reliable enough that a household could decide at seven in the morning to have hot cinnamon rolls at eight. The characters at the end may be a contributor's mark, though they read just as plausibly as a page number; contributors' initials are typical of subscription cookbooks compiled by church and charitable societies, where each woman submitted a handful of family recipes and signed them.