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Moravian Cake
1 pint bread dough 1/2 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 3 eggs Sugar and cinnamon Beat the butter into the bread dough; add the sugar and eggs and beat thoroughly. Pour into buttered pans; let rise for one hour; sprinkle thickly with sugar and cinnamon and bake in a quick oven.
A sweet enriched dough built on a piece of ordinary bread dough — the old thrifty method of making a coffee cake on baking day. Note that the book has filed it under Frozen Desserts, which is a printer's or compiler's error; nothing here is frozen.
- The sugar quantityThe original prints "11/2 cups sugar," which is 1 1/2 cups. Read it that way; 11 cups would be absurd against half a cup of butter.
- A pint of bread doughDough was measured by volume in a bowl, not weighed. A pint of risen white bread dough runs somewhere around 10 to 14 ounces, depending on how far it has risen — about the size of a large grapefruit. Any plain lean white or milk bread dough, after its first rise, will do.
- Beating in the enrichmentsThis is the hinge. Butter, sugar and eggs all slow yeast and slacken the gluten, so the dough will look broken and soupy before it comes together. Work it with a stand mixer and dough hook for several minutes, or by hand with a firm slapping motion, until it is smooth and pulls away from the bowl.
- "Quick oven"Period cookbooks are not consistent, but a quick oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 400 to 425F. That is hot for a sugar-and-cinnamon top, which scorches; 400F for 20 to 25 minutes gives a better result, and the cake is done when the center reads about 190F.
- Pan and depthThe recipe says only "pans," plural, without a size. Since the mixture is poured, keep it shallow — no more than about 3/4 inch deep once risen — in something like a 9x13 pan or two 9-inch rounds, rather than a loaf tin.
- The riseOne hour is right in a warm kitchen at about 75F. In a cool room the heavy dough may need 90 minutes; go by look, not clock, and stop when it has puffed by roughly half.
- The topping, traditionallyMoravian bakers press deep dimples into the risen dough with a fingertip and drop butter into each before scattering the sugar and cinnamon, so the surface pools rather than crusts. The recipe as written omits the butter, and the cake is drier for it.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 15 squares from a 9x13-sized pan. Best the day it is baked, warm.
Moravian sugar cake belongs to the Moravian communities that settled Bethlehem and Nazareth in Pennsylvania in the 1740s and Salem, North Carolina, later in the century, and it is closely tied to their Lovefeast, a service at which coffee and sweet bread are shared in the congregation. The oldest household versions use mashed potato and potato water in the dough; this one takes a shortcut, borrowing a pint of the day's bread dough and enriching it, which is why the recipe assumes you are already baking. The dimpled, buttery, cinnamon-sugared surface is the dish's signature, and Winston-Salem bakeries still sell it by that name.