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Cinnamon Cake
When yeast bread is ready to knead from the sponge, knead and roll out three-fourths of an inch thick, put thin slices of butter on the top, sprinkle with cinnamon, and then with sugar; let rise well and bake.-Misc M. E. Wilcox, Selma, Alabama.
This is a borrowed-dough cake: it assumes you already have bread sponge working on the back of the stove, and gives no pan, temperature or time. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- "Ready to knead from the sponge"Nineteenth-century bread was usually built in two stages: a loose sponge of flour, water and yeast set overnight, then the rest of the flour worked in. Any plain white bread dough at the end of its first rise, roughly enough for a single loaf, will stand in.
- Thickness and panThree-quarters of an inch is the rolled thickness before the second rise; it will roughly double. Press it into a greased 9x13 pan or a large rimmed sheet rather than leaving it free-form, or the butter runs off the edges.
- Butter"Thin slices" over the surface, not melted and brushed. The slices sink into dimples as the dough proves and give the pooled, custardy patches that make this worth eating. Two to three ounces is right for one loaf's worth of dough.
- Sugar and cinnamonNo quantities are given. About half a cup of sugar and two teaspoons of cinnamon covers a 9x13. Dimpling the risen dough with your fingertips before you sugar it helps the topping stay put.
- "Let rise well"Forty-five minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen, until visibly puffed and slow to spring back. Longer than a plain loaf's second rise, since the butter and sugar weigh the surface down.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature or time at all. 400-425F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the surface is deep gold and the sugar has caught at the edges, suits a dough rolled this thick.
- Yield and servingOne 9x13 pan, cut into squares, twelve to sixteen pieces. It is at its best within a few hours of baking, warm, and stales quickly as all lean yeast doughs do.
Cakes like this belong to a whole family of German and Central European Butterkuchen and Zuckerkuchen that came into American home cooking through Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where a piece of the week's bread dough was often said to be pinched off and turned into something sweet rather than a separate batter mixed. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled in Ohio from contributed household recipes, is full of this kind of thrift. The attribution to M. E. Wilcox of Selma, Alabama — the name appears as \"Misc M. E. Wilcox,\" with \"Mrs.\" only a plausible expansion of the abbreviation — is typical of the book's method, in which the contributor's name and town stood as the guarantee of the recipe. That a dough-based cinnamon cake was being made in Alabama shows how far these German-derived breakfast breads had traveled by the 1870s.