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Butterscotch Rolls
Line a layer cake pan with a paste made by creaming 1 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup of shortening. Roll baking powder biscuit dough to 1/4 inch thickness. Sprinkle the following on top: 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 cup raisins and 1/2 cup nuts. Roll and cut in 1/2 inch pieces. Place in pan with cut side down. Be sure to only half fill pan so syrup does not overflow. Bake in hot oven until done, about 20 minutes.
A sticky-bun formula stripped to its essentials: creamed brown sugar and fat in the pan bottom, biscuit dough rolled around cinnamon sugar, fruit and nuts. The original assumes you already know how to mix baking powder biscuits.
- The hinge: half-fill the panAs the sugar-and-shortening paste melts it becomes a thin syrup with nowhere to go but up. Leave the pan no more than half full and set it on a sheet pan to catch what escapes anyway.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400-450F; 425F is a reasonable reading. Twenty minutes at that heat browns the biscuit and caramelises the bottom paste without scorching the sugar.
- ShorteningIn an American book of this period this means hydrogenated vegetable shortening or lard. Butter gives a better-tasting caramel but browns faster, so check the undersides at 15 minutes.
- The biscuit doughNo quantity is given. A standard two-cup batch -- 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 cup fat, about 3/4 cup milk -- rolls to roughly a 9x12-inch rectangle at 1/4 inch and fills one 9-inch layer pan.
- A cup of sugar in the filling is a lotAgainst a two-cup dough that is very sweet, on top of the brown sugar paste beneath. Half a cup of granulated or brown sugar with the cinnamon is plenty for most palates.
- Cutting and spacingHalf-inch slices are thin; a serrated knife or a length of dental floss cuts them without squashing the spiral. Leave gaps between them in the pan so they can rise into each other.
- Turn them out at onceInvert onto a plate within a minute or two of leaving the oven. Cooled in the pan, the butterscotch sets hard and stays behind.
- YieldThe original gives none. Cut at half an inch, the dough described above makes considerably more slices than one half-filled 9-inch pan will take.