Home › Cocoanut Breakfast Dishes › Coffee Cake
Coffee Cake with Honey & Cocoanut
¾ cup butter or butter substitute ½ cup sugar 2 eggs, beaten 2 tablespoons honey or sirup ¾ cup milk 2 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut Beat butter or butter substitute with sugar until creamy, add eggs, honey or sirup, and milk, then sift in flour and baking powder, and add cocoanut. Beat well and turn into a round, greased and floured tin which has a muffin ring in the center. Bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. Spread evenly with honey or sirup and sprinkle with Dromedary Cocoanut.
A quick-bread coffee cake baked in a ring, from a promotional booklet for packaged shredded coconut. The batter is stiff and the ring shape matters more than it looks.
- The measurementsThe butter and milk quantities are printed as "34 cup," which is a damaged rendering of "¾ cup." The sugar reads "1½ cup," high against 2 cups of flour; ½ to ¾ cup gives a better-balanced cake, though there is no way to tell from the page whether the printed figure is an error.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350 to 375F. Thirty minutes is plausible for a ring tin of ordinary size; test with a skewer in the thickest part of the batter.
- Muffin ring in the centerThis is a plain metal ring set in the middle of a round cake tin to make a hole, so the dense batter cooks through from both sides. A tube pan or an angel-food pan does the same job; a plain round tin will need longer and may stay damp in the center.
- Butter substituteIn this period the term meant oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening. Modern block margarine or butter both work; whipped tub spreads have too much water for a creamed batter.
- Dromedary CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut, moist and lightly sweetened. Sweetened flaked coconut is the closest current equivalent. Unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier and will pull moisture from the crumb, so soak it briefly in some of the milk if that is what you have.
- SirupPeriod spelling of syrup, meaning cane or corn syrup, or golden syrup. Honey and any of these are interchangeable here in both the batter and the topping.
- The toppingSpread the honey or syrup while the cake is still warm so it soaks in slightly, then press the coconut on. Coconut scattered on a cold, dry surface will not stick.
- YieldOne ring cake, serving eight to ten depending on the tin. Best the day it is baked; the coconut in the crumb helps it keep for a second day if wrapped.
Dromedary was the brand name used by the Hills Brothers Company of New York for dates and, later, for packaged shredded coconut, and this booklet exists to persuade cooks to reach for the tin rather than crack a nut. Shredded coconut only became a pantry staple once it could be dried, sweetened and sealed for shipping, which put a tropical ingredient into ordinary American baking within a generation. The dish itself is coffee cake in the older American sense: not a cake containing coffee, but a sweet quick bread meant to be eaten alongside it, leavened with baking powder rather than yeast so it could go from bowl to oven in one morning. The ring shape with a muffin ring dropped in the middle looks like a thrifty improvisation, presumably from a time when a dedicated tube pan was not yet a fixture in every kitchen.