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Breakfast Coffee Cake
To three-quarters of cup of sugar add one teaspoon butter, one cup of milk, two eggs, two heaping teaspoons baking powder, flour enough to make a good batter; put in a shallow baking pan, sprinkle over top with chopped peanuts and cinnamon, and bake about twenty minutes in moderate oven.
A plain, fast batter cake of the kind that got made while the coffee was on. The vague flour instruction is the only real obstacle.
- "Flour enough to make a good batter"Aim for about 2 cups of all-purpose flour, added a half cup at a time until the batter is thick enough to mound on a spoon but still spreadable — closer to muffin batter than pourable pancake batter. Too little flour and the peanut topping sinks.
- Moderate oven350°F. Twenty minutes is right for a shallow pan; test with a skewer in the center.
- Pan size"Shallow baking pan" means an 8- or 9-inch square, greased. The batter should sit about three-quarters of an inch deep — spread thinner and it will be dry before it colors.
- One teaspoon butterThat is as written: this is a very lean cake that depends on the milk and eggs. A tablespoon, melted, gives a noticeably better crumb without changing its character.
- Baking powderTwo heaping teaspoons for two cups of flour is generous by modern standards; the strength of period baking powders varied considerably from brand to brand and with the age of the tin. Two level teaspoons is closer to modern practice and avoids a metallic aftertaste.
- The toppingChopped peanuts and cinnamon alone will taste flat to a modern palate. Mix the nuts and cinnamon with a tablespoon or two of sugar before scattering them.
- YieldAn 8-inch square cuts into nine squares. Best the day it is baked; with this little fat it stales quickly.
"Coffee cake" here means a cake to be eaten with coffee, not one made from it — a form often traced to the German Kaffeekuchen tradition, whose influence spread widely through American home baking in the nineteenth century. What makes this version of its moment is the leavening and the nuts: chemical baking powder, commercially available from around the middle of the century, let a cook put a sweet cake on the breakfast table in under half an hour, where a yeast-raised coffee cake needed to be started the night before. Peanuts, cheap and increasingly sold shelled and roasted by the end of the century, stood in for the almonds or walnuts a costlier recipe would have called for.