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Molasses Cakes
Two dozen molasses cakes may be made in the following way: 1 cup molasses 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup lard 1 cup buttermilk 2½ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking soda 2 tablespoons boiling water 1 egg 1 teaspoon ground ginger 1 teaspoon ground cloves ½ teaspoon cinnamon Pinch of salt Mix.
Put molasses, sugar, lard, spices and a pinch of salt in basin to warm.
Add the egg unbroken, also milk. Dissolve the soda in the boiling water and add to other ingredients. Then sift in the flour and beat all ingredients well together in basin. Bake in patty pans in moderate oven for 20 minutes.
A soft, cakey gingerbread baked in small tins rather than one loaf. The batter is thin and pours; treat it like muffin batter, not cookie dough.
- Patty pansThese are small shallow tart or bun tins, smaller and shallower than a modern muffin cup. A muffin tin is the nearest substitute; fill the cups only partway and expect more than one batch to reach the two dozen the recipe promises. Grease well; molasses batter sticks.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At twenty minutes the tops should spring back and a tester come out clean. Molasses browns fast and hides doneness, so go by touch rather than colour.
- Warm, do not cookThe molasses, sugar, lard and spices are warmed only enough to melt the fat and loosen the syrup. Take the basin off the heat before the egg goes in, or you will get threads of cooked egg through the batter.
- "Add the egg unbroken"This means the egg goes in whole and unbeaten, straight from the shell, to be worked in during the general beating. There is nothing to gain by pre-beating it here, though nothing lost either.
- LardHalf a cup, 4 oz. Modern shortening or softened butter substitutes at the same volume; lard gives the tenderest crumb and the most period-correct flavour.
- Soda and buttermilkTwo teaspoons is a lot of soda, but molasses and buttermilk are both acidic and it is doing double duty as leavener and as the thing that darkens and softens the crumb. Dissolving it in boiling water first prevents bitter yellow specks.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour; ordinary all-purpose flour is a fair match. Sift it in and beat only until smooth, then stop.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses or light molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what an early twentieth-century Canadian kitchen would have had on the shelf and will overwhelm the spice.
- Yield and keepingTwo dozen small cakes. They are better on the second day, once the spice settles and the crumb moistens; keep them in a closed tin.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada in the early twentieth century, given away or sold cheaply with the sack. Recipes like this one show the economics of a prairie and small-town pantry: molasses and brown sugar rather than white, lard rather than butter, buttermilk left over from churning, and soda instead of a purchased baking powder. Spiced molasses cakes of this kind descend from the long English gingerbread tradition, which crossed to North America and then shifted as cane molasses became the cheapest sweetener available. Baking them in patty pans rather than as a single loaf was a practical choice as much as anything: small cakes cook quickly, come out of a variable wood-fired oven more reliably, and pack into a lunch pail.