Cinnamon Buns
One cup butter, two cups sugar, one cup sweet milk, four cups flour, three teaspoonfuls baking powder, four eggs. After they are baked, take them out of the pans, spread butter over them and sift cinnamon and sugar over while hot, then place the hot pans they were baked in over them. Bake in two shallow pans about an inch and a half or two inches deep.
Despite the name, this is not a yeast dough. It is a rich butter cake baked in shallow pans, then buttered and dusted with cinnamon sugar while hot — closer to a coffee cake than to a spiral bun.
- The hinge: the hot pans on topInverting the still-hot baking pans over the buttered, sugared cake traps steam and heat, softening the butter and setting the cinnamon sugar into a glazed crust. Leave them in place a few minutes.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 350F. Shallow pans of this batter take roughly 25 to 30 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the edges pull from the sides.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, specified because many period recipes called for sour milk or buttermilk with saleratus instead. Use whole milk.
- Method, which is assumedNo mixing order is given, presumably because it was taken as understood: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder. Do not overwork once the flour is in.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to four cups of flour is on the light side by modern reckoning, but the four eggs carry much of the lift. Period baking powder was often single-acting, so get the pans into the oven promptly.
- PansTwo square 8- or 9-inch pans, or two 9-inch rounds, at the inch-and-a-half to two-inch depth specified. Grease and flour them, and keep them handy and hot for the inverting step.
- Cinnamon sugarThe amounts are left to the cook. About a third of a cup of sugar to two teaspoons of cinnamon, and two to three tablespoons of softened butter, covers both pans.
- YieldTwo shallow cakes, cut into squares — enough for eight to twelve at table.
In nineteenth-century American cookbooks "bun" was an elastic word, covering anything small, sweet and eaten out of hand, whether raised with yeast or with a chemical leaven. Rolled, sugared cinnamon doughs are often associated with the German baking traditions carried into Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where Schnecken and similar pastries were long established; recipes like this one take the flavour without the labour, since a butter cake could be mixed and baked in far less time than a yeast dough. The proportions here — a cup of butter, four eggs, two cups of sugar — are generous with the more expensive ingredients.