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Coffee Cake (One egg one-half cup of sugar)
One egg, one-half cup of sugar, one cup butter or lard, one cup molasses, one cup coffee, two teaspoons soda, one teaspoon nutmeg, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon cloves, one-half teaspoon ginger, four cups flour, one cup of raisins, one cup chopped nuts, one teaspoon salt if lard is used. One-half receipt makes one large cake.
— Miss Mabel Hill
A dark, heavily spiced molasses cake in the old sense of "coffee cake" — coffee is an ingredient, not an accompaniment. The receipt gives no pan, temperature or time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Oven and timeBake at 325–350F. A full batch in two 9x5-inch loaf pans runs about 55–70 minutes; the half batch Miss Hill mentions, in one large tube or loaf pan, about the same. Molasses and soda brown the crust long before the centre sets, so test with a skewer rather than by colour.
- What "one cup coffee" meansBrewed liquid coffee, strong and cooled -- not grounds and not instant powder. It supplies the liquid for the batter and deepens the molasses flavour; leftover breakfast coffee would have served the purpose.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than ordinary cooking molasses and will dominate the spices.
- Soda, not baking powderTwo teaspoons of soda is the sole leavening and depends on the acidity of the molasses and coffee to work. Mix it into the flour or dissolve it in the coffee, and get the batter into the oven promptly once combined.
- The fatA full cup of butter or lard against only half a cup of sugar is correct for this style -- the molasses is the sweetener. Cream the fat with the sugar, then beat in the egg, molasses and coffee before the flour. The salt is called for only with lard because lard is unsalted, while butter of the period was commonly salted.
- Flour and consistencyMeasure the four cups scooped and levelled; expect a thick batter closer to a stiff drop than a pour. Hold back a few tablespoons if it seems dry, and toss the raisins and nuts in a little of the flour so they do not sink.
- YieldThe full receipt is a large quantity -- two loaves, roughly 24 servings. Halving it, as the contributor suggests, is the sensible domestic scale. A dense molasses cake of this kind keeps well wrapped for several days.
This receipt uses coffee as an ingredient rather than as an accompaniment: leftover coffee as the liquid, molasses in place of some of the sugar, soda doing the lifting, and a full range of spices to carry it. Cakes of this type appear under names like molasses cake, spice cake and coffee cake in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American community cookbooks, and they were valued for keeping. The attribution to Miss Mabel Hill, along with her practical note that half the receipt is enough for one large cake, is characteristic of the genre: instructions written for cooks who already knew what a cake batter should look like and needed only the proportions.