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Apple Sauce Cake
1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter 1 cup raisins 1 cup apple sauce 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon nutmeg 2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter and sugar together. Sift the dry ingredients together, and add alternately with the apple sauce to the dry ingredients. Stir in the raisins dredged with a little of the flour saved out for this purpose. Bake in gem pans in a moderate oven about fifteen minutes.
An eggless spice cake that leans on applesauce for moisture and lift. The method as printed is garbled in one place, and the pan it calls for no longer goes by that name.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin pans, usually with shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; expect 12 to 14 cakes, and fill the cups about two-thirds.
- Moderate oven350F. Fifteen minutes suits muffin-sized cakes; test with a skewer at 14 minutes, since applesauce batters can look wet at the surface while being done inside.
- The garbled instruction"Add alternately with the apple sauce to the dry ingredients" cannot be followed as printed, since the dry ingredients have just been sifted together. The sense intended is that the dry ingredients and the applesauce be added alternately to the creamed butter and sugar.
- ApplesauceHome-cooked sauce varied in sweetness and was often thicker than modern jarred sauce. Modern sweetened jarred sauce will push the cake noticeably sweeter; unsweetened is the safer match. Drain off any free liquid if it is loose.
- Soda plus baking powderBoth are needed: the soda reacts with the acid in the apples, the powder covers the rest. There are no eggs here, so do not slack on either, and get the batter into the oven once mixed.
- Dredging the raisinsReserve a tablespoon or two of the measured flour to coat the raisins so they do not sink. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes first keeps them from drawing moisture out of the crumb.
- SaltNone is listed, which is normal when the butter was salted. With unsalted butter, add 1/2 teaspoon.
- NutmegA full teaspoon of nutmeg is assertive by current taste, and freshly grated nutmeg is stronger than the pre-ground tin. Half a teaspoon is a reasonable starting point.
Applesauce cake belongs to a wide American family of fruit-and-spice cakes generally associated with thrift, in which a cheap acid ingredient reacts with saleratus or soda to raise a batter that has no eggs to help it. Raisins and the cinnamon-clove-nutmeg trio were a common flavour of inexpensive cake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baking in gem pans rather than a loaf tin produces small cakes that bake in a quarter of an hour rather than needing a fire held steady for an hour.