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Coffee Cake
11/2 cakes compressed yeast 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoon sugar 3 cups sifted flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter 3 eggs 1½ cups mixed fruit Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in the lukewarm milk; add one and a half cups of flour and beat well. Cover and set aside, in a warm place to rise for one hour on until light. Add to this the butter and sugar creamed, the fruit-citron, raisins and currants in equal parts-which has been floured, the balance of the flour or enough to make a good cake batter, the salt, and eggs well beaten. Beat for ten minutes; pour into well-buttered molds, filling them about half full; cover and let rise until molds are nearly full; then bake in a moderate oven. If made into two cakes, they should bake forty-five minutes; one large cake should bake one hour
A yeast-risen fruit cake in the German kaffeekuchen tradition — closer to a light stollen batter than to the streusel-topped coffee cake most Americans expect. The section heading is a misfiling; nothing here is frozen.
- The yeastA cake of compressed yeast was commonly about 0.6 oz, though sizes varied, so 1½ cakes is roughly an ounce of fresh yeast. Substitute about one to one and a half packets (2¼–3½ teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast; dry yeast is more concentrated by weight than fresh.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere in the 350–375F range. With this much sugar and butter the crust browns early — tent with foil if it colors before the center sets.
- Milk temperatureScalding raw milk was standard practice, generally explained as destroying components that slackened the dough. With pasteurized milk you can skip it, but the milk must be lukewarm (about 100F) and no hotter when the yeast goes in.
- The hinge: two rises, not oneThe sponge stage — half the flour, milk, yeast, one tablespoon sugar — must be genuinely light and bubbling before the sugar, butter and eggs go in. Sugar and fat added too early slow the yeast badly, and a rushed sponge gives a dense, greasy cake.
- Beat for ten minutesNot padding. This is a slack enriched batter and needs the gluten developed by beating rather than kneading; five to seven minutes on a stand mixer's paddle at medium is equivalent.
- Mixed fruitEqual parts citron, raisins and currants, as stated — 1½ cups total, tossed in a little of the measured flour so it does not sink. Candied citron is still sold at holidays; chopped candied orange peel is the usual stand-in.
- MoldsUse two loaf pans or tube pans of about 6-cup capacity, filled half full. The second rise takes 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen, not the hour the sponge needed.
- YieldTwo loaves, each serving eight to ten, or one large cake. Test with a skewer at 45 minutes for the smaller loaves — enriched yeast batters dry out quickly past done.
Yeast-raised coffee cakes came into American cookbooks through German and Austrian immigrant baking, where kaffeekuchen meant simply a sweet bread eaten with coffee rather than any particular shape or topping. The citron-raisin-currant mixture here is the standard nineteenth-century "mixed fruit" trio of candied peel and dried vine fruit, and it puts this cake in the same family as stollen and the German Gugelhupf baked in a fluted mold. Compressed yeast, marketed in the United States from about 1868 and more widely taken up after 1876, is what made a recipe like this practical for a home cook — before it, she would have kept a liquid sponge or potato ferment going herself.