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Cinnamon Cake
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 2 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup light brown sugar 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 egg 1/4 teaspoonful salt CINNAMON Cake, always satisfying and delicious, is one of the most popular of the raised cakes. Surprise your family with one made by this recipe. Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in the lukewarm milk. Add three-fourths cup flour to make sponge. Beat well, cover and let rise forty-five minutes in a moderately warm place.
Add butter and sugar creamed, egg well beaten, about one and one-fourth cups flour, or sufficient to make a soft dough, and the salt. Knead lightly, place in greased bowl. Cover and let rise in a warm place about two hours, or until double in bulk.
Roll one-half inch thick and place in well-greased pan and let rise until light--about an hour and a half. Cut across top with sharp knife, brush with egg, sprinkle liberally with sugar and cinnamon. Bake twenty minutes in a moderately hot oven.
The name misleads. This is not a cake in the modern sense but a yeast-raised sheet, rolled half an inch thick, scattered with cinnamon sugar and baked in twenty minutes.
- Handle it as breadNothing here is creamed into a batter and poured. The butter and sugar are creamed and then worked into a sponge of yeast, milk and flour, and what comes out is a soft dough that gets rolled. The whole method belongs to bread, not to cake.
- One cake of yeast, and the milkA cake of compressed yeast is about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, a single sachet. It is dissolved in the milk, which the recipe has scalded and cooled for a reason: milk above roughly 110°F (43°C) starts killing yeast, and milk straight off the heat will kill all of it. Cool it to blood heat before the yeast goes anywhere near it.
- The panNo pan size is given. Two cups of flour rolled half an inch thick covers about an eight- or nine-inch square, which is the size to aim for. Spread over anything larger it bakes thin and dry.
- Slash, wash, sprinkleNo quantity is given for the topping either. A few tablespoons of granulated sugar mixed with a teaspoon of cinnamon covers a pan this size; mix them before scattering or the cinnamon lands in streaks. Make the knife cuts first, as the booklet has it, so the risen dough opens where it is meant to instead of tearing at the sides.
- Go by the dough, not the clockThe rising times assume a cooler kitchen than most people keep. In a warm room the final rise will be ready well before the hour and a half allowed for it. It is ready when a dent pressed into the edge fills back slowly rather than springing straight out.
- A moderately hot ovenAround 375°F (190°C) for the twenty minutes given. Egg wash and sugar both darken fast, so look at it at fifteen.
The booklet files this under raised cakes, and the category name is the revealing part: it only needs saying in a world where the unraised sort, lifted by baking powder and mixed in minutes, has become the default. A yeast company had an obvious interest in keeping a foot in the cake pan, and the headnote duly insists this is one of the most popular of its kind. The form itself is older than the sales argument. A sweetened, enriched bread dough pressed flat into a pan and finished with cinnamon and sugar is recognisably the Kuchen of German baking, which came to American kitchens with German immigrants and settled in as what is now called coffee cake. What the booklet adds is the pitch: the suggestion that a cook might surprise the family with it, as though the thing were a novelty rather than something a great many households had been eating for a long time.