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Cinnamon Sweet Cake
1 cup brown sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1 egg 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon cinnamon 3/4 cup milk 3 teaspoons baking powder Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the egg and cinnamon; then the flour and milk alternately and the baking powder last. Pour into two shallow greased baking tins; spread brown sugar, cinnamon and bits of butter over the top and bake in a moderately hot oven.
A plain one-egg coffee cake with a sugar-and-cinnamon crust, of the type baked in shallow pans and cut in squares. The method is straightforward; the printing is not.
- The stray ingredient listThe four lines at the end — 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk — belong to no instruction in this recipe; they look like the opening of a following recipe that has been carried over, though the cause of the mix-up cannot be established from the page. Work from the first list only.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately hot oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 375–400F. In two shallow tins the layers are thin and bake in roughly 20 to 25 minutes; test with a skewer at 18.
- The pansTwo shallow tins are best read as two 8-inch square or round pans, giving cake about an inch high. One 9x13 pan works but will need closer to 30 minutes and a lighter hand with the topping so it does not sink.
- One tablespoon of butterThe quantity may look like an error, and the stray "1/2 cup butter" line nearby invites doubt, but taken as printed this is a lean cake that leans on the buttered sugar crust for richness. Do not be tempted to cream a tablespoon of cold butter; have it soft, or the sugar will simply refuse to combine.
- Baking powder lastAdding the leavening last is the instruction as printed, and a common one in period recipes. With modern double-acting powder it is better whisked into the flour first, so it distributes evenly; either way, get the batter into the pans promptly.
- The toppingNo quantities are given. About 1/3 cup brown sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon and two tablespoons of butter in small flecks covers two shallow pans. Scatter it, do not press it in, or it melts into a wet layer rather than a crust.
- Brown sugarBrown sugar of this period was generally moister and less uniform than today's. Light brown sugar, packed, is the closest match; dark brown gives a heavier molasses note than the recipe seems to intend.
- YieldTwo shallow pans cut into about 16 squares each. It is best the day it is baked — with this little fat it stales quickly.
Cakes like this one sit at the junction between bread and confectionery in American home cookbooks: barely sweetened by cake standards, leavened with baking powder rather than eggs, and finished with a sugar crust that does the work a frosting would do in a richer recipe. The cinnamon-and-brown-sugar topping is the same idea that runs through Pennsylvania and Midwestern crumb cakes and, further back, the German Streuselkuchen associated with immigrant bakers, though this version is simpler than any of them: no rubbed-in flour, just sugar, spice and dots of butter left to melt into the surface.