Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Nut Breakfast Cake
Nut Breakfast Cake
1 C sugar 2 T butter 1 egg 3 t baking powder 1 C milk 2% C flour Mix as plain cake. Just before putting into oven, sprinkle sugar and cinnamon, mixed, over the top. Cover lightly with chopped peanuts. Bake in shallow pan in moderate oven.
A plain one-egg cake batter with a cinnamon-sugar and peanut topping, closer to a coffee cake than anything sweet enough for dessert. It comes together in one bowl and bakes fast.
- MeasurementsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. The flour quantity as printed is unclear; a batter of this type with 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk and 3 teaspoons baking powder wants roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour, and you should judge by consistency rather than trusting the printed figure.
- Moderate oven350F. A shallow pan at that temperature will take about 25 to 30 minutes for a 9-inch square, less for a larger sheet.
- "Mix as plain cake"Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Only 2 tablespoons of butter means the creaming will be sandy rather than fluffy; that is expected.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to about 2 1/2 cups flour is a heavy hand by modern standards, and period powders were mostly single-acting, so the amounts called for are not directly comparable to today's. Two teaspoons is worth trying if you find the full quantity leaves an aftertaste.
- Shallow panA 9-inch square or an 8x12 pan. A shallow bake gives a high ratio of cinnamon-sugar crust to crumb, so a loaf tin is the wrong shape for it.
- The toppingSprinkle the cinnamon sugar and nuts on the wet batter just before it goes in, as directed. If you scatter them on partway through baking, the set surface will not hold them and they slide off when cut.
- PeanutsUse unsalted roasted peanuts, chopped coarse, about 1/2 cup. Salted cocktail peanuts overwhelm a batter this lightly sweetened.
- YieldNine to twelve squares. Best the day it is baked; the topping softens overnight.
One-egg cakes like this were common in early twentieth-century printed collections, and the shorthand here tells you why they worked: a contributor could set down eight ingredients on two lines and trust that every reader knew what "mix as plain cake" meant. Peanuts as a baking nut spread widely in American home kitchens after the crop's expansion in the South in the early 1900s, when they became far cheaper than walnuts or almonds, and recipes that would once have called for hickory nuts or butternuts began naming them instead. A cake like this, baked shallow and cut in squares, occupied the ground between bread and dessert on a breakfast or supper table, which is exactly why it sits in the bread chapter rather than among the cakes.