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Coffee Cake (C sugar egg T melted butter)
12 C sugar 1 egg 3 T melted butter or substitute 2 C flour ¾ C milk 4 t baking powder 12 t salt Break egg in bowl and beat. Add sugar, butter, milk and flour to which baking powder and salt have been added. Beat well. Place in a square pan, cover with mixture of 2T sugar and ½ t cinnamon and bake in 400 degree oven for twenty minutes. Nuts may be added to top mixture.
Mrs. Reid. 2 C flour 12 t salt
A plain one-egg coffee cake of the quick-bread type, mixed in a single bowl and finished with cinnamon sugar. Everything hinges on not overworking the batter once the flour goes in.
- The fractionsThe quantities as printed have lost their fraction marks. Read them as 1/2 cup sugar, 3/4 cup milk and 1/2 teaspoon salt; the flour is 2 cups and the baking powder 4 teaspoons.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour works out at two teaspoons per cup, roughly double the 1 to 1.25 teaspoons per cup common in modern recipes. Three teaspoons will still give plenty of lift and less risk of a metallic aftertaste.
- "Beat well" is not literalWith a stand mixer or electric beater, combine only until the flour disappears, or the cake will be tough and tunnelled.
- Butter or substituteThe substitute is most likely shortening or margarine. Melted butter is better eating; whichever you use, let it cool slightly so it does not begin cooking the egg.
- Pan size"A square pan" most likely means 8 by 8 inches. A 9-inch square pan will also work but gives a shallower cake that will be done sooner, so start checking early.
- Oven and doneness400F is correct and deliberately brisk for a shallow cake. Twenty minutes is the outer limit at that heat; test at 16 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- The toppingTwo tablespoons of sugar with half a teaspoon of cinnamon is a thin dusting. If you add nuts, chop them fine and press them lightly into the batter so they do not roll off when the cake is cut.
- YieldNine squares from an 8-inch pan. Best eaten the day it is baked; it stales quickly, as low-fat quick breads do.
Coffee cake in the American sense is not flavoured with coffee but meant to be eaten alongside it, a habit usually traced to German and Central European Kaffeekuchen traditions that took root across the Midwest. Yeast-raised versions were increasingly joined, as chemical leavening became cheap and reliable, by baking-powder batters of exactly this kind, which a cook could mix and bake inside half an hour. Community cookbooks are full of them, usually credited to a named contributor -- no rising time, one bowl, and a cinnamon-sugar top that needed no icing or filling.