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Honeymoon Coffee Cake
1/2 cup sugar 1/4 cup margarine 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups flour 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon vanilla pinch salt Combine as for cake. Place in greased pie pans. Sprinkle over top of dough a mixture of melted margarine, sugar and cinnamon. Bake 15 minutes in hot oven 400 degrees. Cut in triangular pieces, like pie, and serve hot with butter for breakfast or supper.
A quick baking-powder coffee cake baked thin in pie pans, which is what keeps the 15-minute bake honest. The only vague part is the topping, which is given without quantities.
- Pan size and yieldThe recipe says "pie pans" plural, but the batter is small, on the order of two cups, and would comfortably fill one 9-inch pan. Split between two pans you get a very thin cake that will likely be done before the stated 15 minutes. One 9-inch pan cut in eight wedges serves four to six.
- Combine as for cakeThat means cream the sugar and margarine, beat in the egg and vanilla, then add the flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; this is a soft batter and overbeating gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- The topping, unmeasuredNo quantities are given. For a 9-inch pan, about 2 tablespoons melted margarine, 1/4 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon covers the surface. Drizzle the fat first, then scatter the sugar and cinnamon, or the mixture sinks in patches.
- Hot ovenThe 400F given here is accurate for what mid-century books called a hot oven. Bake on a rack in the middle of the oven and start checking at 12 minutes.
- DonenessA thin quick cake goes from moist to dry quickly. The centre should spring back and a pick come out clean; the cinnamon crust makes the usual colour cue unreliable.
- MargarinePeriod margarine was a hard, salted, water-bearing block. A modern stick margarine or butter works; soft tub spreads carry more water and give a slacker batter. If you use butter, keep the pinch of salt.
- ServingIt is meant to be eaten hot from the pan with butter, and like most quick cakes it is best the day it is baked. Bake it the morning you want it rather than the night before.
Coffee cake in the American sense is not made with coffee but served alongside it, a habit generally traced to Central European Kaffeekuchen and streuselkuchen and well established by the time chemical leavening made a cake possible in under half an hour. Why this one is called "honeymoon" is not recorded; the short ingredient list, small yield and absence of yeast would suit a small household, but that is inference rather than a documented origin. Baking it in pie pans and cutting it in wedges may simply reflect the pans a kitchen had on hand, and the instruction to serve it for breakfast or supper places it at the lighter meals of the day.