Spice Cakes
One cup melted butter, one cup sugar, one-half cup molasses, one-half cup water, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon ground coriander seed, one teaspoon ground caraway seed, one teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon soda, one nutmeg, flour to mix soft. Roll them and bake them quickly.
This is a rolled molasses cookie dough despite the name "cakes" — nineteenth-century American usage called any small flat sweet a cake. The recipe assumes a cook who knows dough by feel, so the flour is the main thing you have to judge.
- "Flour to mix soft"Genuinely unquantified, and it depends on your butter and molasses. Expect somewhere around 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cups; stop when the dough just holds together and pulls from the bowl but is still tacky. Chill it an hour before rolling or it will stick badly.
- Bake them quicklyThis implies a hot oven; in a modern range something in the region of 400-425F for roughly 7 to 10 minutes suits thin rolled molasses cookies, though the recipe gives no temperature or time. They colour fast at that heat, so watch the first tray and use it to time the rest.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons, so more than double any one of the other spices. It tends to dominate; half a nutmeg gives a more balanced result.
- Coriander and carawayBoth need to be freshly ground to taste of anything. Pre-ground caraway in particular goes flat and slightly soapy on the shelf; grind the seeds in a spice mill or mortar.
- Soda, not baking powder"Soda" here is bicarbonate of soda, and it works because the molasses is acidic. Dissolve it in the half cup of water so it disperses evenly — dry soda in a stiff dough leaves bitter yellow flecks.
- Melted butterA full cup is two sticks. Let it cool to barely warm before mixing so it does not simply dissolve the sugar.
- Rolling thicknessRoll to about 1/8 inch for a crisp cookie, 1/4 inch for a chewier one, and cut with a plain round. The original gives no size or yield; both depend on how thin you roll and the cutter you use.
- KeepingMolasses cookies soften over a day or two as the sugar draws moisture. Stored airtight they keep well over a week.
Caraway and coriander in a sweet dough are the surviving trace of a much older English tradition: seed cake and "caraway comfits" were standard in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century baking. By the nineteenth century American baking leaned more heavily on cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, and recipes like this one — which uses all five at once — sit between the two habits. The molasses is the other period marker: cheaper than sugar, a byproduct of the West Indies trade, and mildly acidic, so it also served to activate the soda.