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Quick Sour Cream Cakes
3 T cocoa ¼ t cinnamon 1 C sugar 1¼ C pastry flour 1/4 t salt 1 C sour cream 1t soda 4 eggs It it baking powder Mix cocoa, cinnamon, sugar, flour, salt and add to sour cream and eggs which have been well beaten together. Bake in small muffin pans or paper cups in a moderately hot oven for 25 minutes. Oven temperature 375°. 1/2 C butter ½ C sugar
The text has come through the scanner with several numbers mangled, so read the ingredient list with care before you start. What follows sorts out the likely intent and flags the places where the original is simply unclear.
- The baking powder lineThe cinnamon and pastry flour quantities were checked against the printed page and read as our text now gives them: a quarter teaspoon and one and a quarter cups. "It it baking powder" remains garbled; read it as 1 teaspoon baking powder.
- The stray last lineThe "1/2 C butter 1 1/2 C sugar" at the end has no place in this recipe: nothing in the method uses butter, and the batter already has a cup of sugar. It most likely belongs to an adjacent recipe; ignore it here.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute by measuring 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour and replacing two tablespoons of it with cornstarch, or use a cake flour blend.
- Sour creamSour cream of the period was often cream soured naturally, and may well have been thinner and more acidic than the thick cultured tubs sold now. Modern full-fat sour cream works; if it is very stiff, slacken it with a tablespoon of buttermilk so it beats smoothly with the eggs.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda reacts with the acid in the cream and the cocoa; the baking powder is insurance. Because the soda starts working the moment wet meets dry, get the pans filled and into the oven promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- OvenThe book gives 375F, which matches "moderately hot" in kitchens of the period. No adjustment needed.
- CocoaThree tablespoons is a modest amount, and it would most likely have been natural (non-alkalized) cocoa, which is acidic and adds to what the soda reacts with. Dutch-process cocoa will mute the rise and the tang; natural cocoa is the better match.
- Yield and donenessYield depends on the pan: the batter runs to roughly three and a half cups, so expect about a dozen from a standard tin filled two-thirds, and correspondingly more from the small pans or paper cups the recipe calls for. At 25 minutes they should spring back and a tester come out clean; the crumb is meant to be light and slightly moist rather than dry like a plain muffin.
Sour cream cakes belong to a large family of American quick breads built on the chemistry of an acidic dairy product and baking soda, a method that spread rapidly once reliable soda and baking powder became cheap household goods in the later nineteenth century. In a farm-adjacent community, cream that had gone sour was a routine surplus rather than a purchase, and recipes that used it up were practical economy as much as baking. What garbling appears in the printed page, and later in the scan of it, is scanner damage.