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Emergency Coffee Cake
3 t baking powder 12 t salt 2 C flour 1/3 C brown sugar oven Mrs. Jessie Higgins. 2 eggs, well beaten ⅔ C sweet milk 1/3 C melted shortening Sift baking powder, salt and flour.. Mix in brown sugar. Beat eggs light and add milk and melted shortening. Add to dry ingredients. Spread on greased tin and dot with bits of butter. Sprikle with mixture of 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and cover with chopped nut meats. Bake in moderate oven 25 to 30 minutes.
Mrs. Earl L. Gruenwald.
A plain quick coffee cake with a cinnamon-sugar-and-nut topping, of the sort meant to be mixed and in the oven inside ten minutes. A few of the quantities need interpreting before you start.
- SaltPrinted as "12 t salt," which is a lost fraction: half a teaspoon is the standard amount for 2 cups of flour in a cake of this type. Read it as 1/2 teaspoon.
- Milk"23 C sweet milk" should be read as 2/3 cup. Two and a third cups would give a batter far too thin to spread and dot with butter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as distinct from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes call for when soda is the leavening. Since this uses baking powder, use plain whole milk.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. In that range 25 to 30 minutes is right for a shallow cake; test with a toothpick in the centre.
- Pan"Greased tin" is unspecified; an 8- or 9-inch square is about the right volume for 2 cups of flour. A much larger sheet pan will give a thinner, drier cake.
- ShorteningMelted lard, butter or vegetable shortening all work. Melted butter gives the best flavour.
- Topping orderDot the butter first, then the cinnamon sugar, then the nuts, as the recipe directs.
- MixingCombine wet and dry only until the flour disappears. Beating a baking-powder batter smooth toughens it.
- YieldAbout nine squares. Best warm the day it is baked.
"Emergency" in a cookbook of this kind is generally taken to mean a recipe you could make from cupboard staples when visitors appeared without notice, and the name is often said to mark a whole class of them: emergency cake, emergency biscuits, emergency soup. Everything here keeps on a shelf or in an ordinary icebox, and no creaming or rising time is required, which is precisely the point. Coffee cake itself takes its name not from any coffee in the batter but from the occasion, the mid-morning or afternoon coffee at which it was served, a habit traditionally said to have been carried into the American Midwest in large part by German and Scandinavian settlers. Compiled cookbooks like this one collected such recipes from contributors by name, which is why two contributors' names sit near this entry.