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Coffee Cake
2 cups brown sugar 1 cup molasses 1 cup butter 1 cup strong coffee 2 eggs 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoons ground cloves 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1 pound raisins 1 pound currants 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup coffee ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal in early twentieth-century cake chapters where the reader was assumed to know how to cream, beat and bake. A few things need sorting out before you start.
- The list has been run togetherThe first eleven items make a complete spiced fruit cake. The trailing "1 cup coffee, ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar" reads like the beginning of a second recipe or a coffee icing set beside it in the original column, though the page as given does not say so. Do not add them to the batter.
- What "coffee cake" means hereNot the American streusel-topped breakfast cake. This is a dark fruit cake flavoured and moistened with brewed coffee, closer to a boiled fruit loaf than to anything eaten with a morning cup.
- Strong coffeeBrew it strong, around two tablespoons of grounds to the cup, and let it cool before it goes in. Just how strong "strong" was in the original kitchen is not recorded.
- Soda and molassesOne teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it works against the acidity of the molasses and coffee. There is no baking powder here; the cake is meant to be dense. Dissolve the soda in a spoonful of the warm coffee so it disperses evenly.
- Two pounds of fruitA pound each of raisins and currants against four cups of flour is a heavy fruit ratio. Toss the fruit in a few spoonfuls of the measured flour so it stays suspended, and expect a batter that is stiff enough to need spreading rather than pouring.
- Oven and tinA cake this rich and this large wants a slow oven, 300 to 325F, in a lined and paper-collared tin. At 350F the outside sets and darkens long before the middle is done. Reckon on two to two and a half hours in a deep 9-inch pan, testing with a skewer.
- YieldThis makes a substantial cake, or two loaf tins. Like most heavy fruit cakes it improves after a few days wrapped and kept in a tin.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour substitutes directly; measure by scooping and levelling, as the book's cups were not weighed.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and given away or sold cheaply to promote its flour, and it was among the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canadian households by the 1910s. Cakes like this one, dark with molasses and cloves and loaded with dried fruit, were the standard keeping cake of the period: expensive spices and imported currants and raisins were the treat, while coffee did the double duty of adding liquid and deepening the colour and bitterness against all that sugar. This page appears as a bare ingredient list, on the assumption that a reader consulting the cake chapter already knew to cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, and alternate flour with liquid. The habit of using leftover breakfast coffee in baking is generally traced to plain domestic thrift rather than to any single dish.