Coffee Cake
1 1/2 cakes FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 3 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoonful mace 1 1/2 cups mixed fruit--citron, raisins, currants, in equal parts 1/4 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs TEST the goodness of this Coffee Cake for yourself. It's delightful any time--for luncheon, afternoon tea or Sunday supper. With hot chocolate or rich creamy milk, it makes a tasty and nutritious meal.
Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in the lukewarm milk, add one and one-half cups of flour. Beat well. Cover and set aside, in a warm place, to rise one hour, or until light.
Add to this the butter and sugar creamed, the mace, the fruit which has been floured, the balance of the flour, or enough to make a good cake batter, the salt, and eggs well beaten. Beat for ten minutes.
Pour into well-buttered molds, filling them about half full, cover and let rise until molds are nearly full, then bake in a moderate oven. If made into two cakes, they should bake forty-five minutes; one large cake should bake one hour.
This is not the American coffee cake of crumb topping and baking powder. It is a yeast-raised fruit cake, mixed as a batter and baked in molds, and it takes most of a morning.
- One and a half cakes of yeastA cake of compressed yeast is roughly two and a quarter teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or one 7g sachet, so one and a half cakes is a generous tablespoon — a sachet and a half. The quantity is high on purpose. Butter, a cup of sugar and a cup and a half of fruit all weigh a dough down, and sweet doughs routinely take more yeast than plain ones to move at the same speed.
- Citron means candied peelThe citron here is candied citron peel, a thick-skinned citrus sold in tubs alongside the holiday baking supplies and scarce the rest of the year. Candied orange or lemon peel stands in for it without complaint. It is not the soft drink and not fresh fruit.
- Flour the fruit from the flour already measuredTossing the raisins, currants and citron in flour keeps them suspended instead of settling into the bottom of the mold. Take that flour from the three cups the recipe already calls for; adding extra on top stiffens the batter.
- MaceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than the nutmeg inside it. An eighth of a teaspoon across three cups of flour is a background note, not a flavor that announces itself. Nutmeg is the nearest substitute and belongs in the same small quantity.
- Ten minutes of beatingThe instruction is literal. This is a batter stiff enough to need it, and the gluten that develops is what holds the fruit in suspension through the rise. Four or five minutes on a stand mixer’s paddle does the same work.
- Half-full molds, moderate ovenFill the molds halfway and let them rise until nearly full. A moderate oven is around 350°F (175°C), and the times given assume it: forty-five minutes split between two cakes, an hour for one large. A skewer is the better test either way, since this much fruit keeps the crumb damp long after it is cooked.
Citron, currants, raisins and mace in a sweet yeast dough baked in molds describe a Central European cake rather than an English or an American one. The name is close to the only American thing about it. What the booklet does with the cake is more interesting than where it came from: the copy does not sell it as a treat but as a meal, offering it for luncheon, afternoon tea or Sunday supper and promising that with hot chocolate or milk it makes a nutritious one. Cake as nourishment is a register that belonged to its moment, when food advertising leaned hard on what a thing did for the body, and a company selling one cheap ingredient had every reason to talk about nutrition rather than pleasure.