Oat Cakes
1 cup granulated sugar 1 tablespoon butter 2 eggs 1 tablespoon flour 2½ cups rolled oats 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream the sugar and butter; add the eggs, beaten separately and then together, the vanilla and the dry ingredients, well mixed. Drop the mixture from a teaspoon on buttered tins, allowing room for the cakes to spread. 1/2 cup sugar 1/3 cup butter 1 egg 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup rolled oats
A lace-thin oat drop cookie rather than a Scottish griddle oatcake, and one that needs a couple of things the original leaves out entirely — chiefly an oven temperature and a note about how much these spread.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are browned and the centres still look barely set. They firm as they cool.
- They spread enormouslyOne tablespoon of flour for two and a half cups of oats means there is almost no structure holding these together. Space the teaspoonfuls at least two inches apart and bake no more than a dozen per sheet.
- Buttered tins are the weak pointOn a greased pan a batter this loose welds itself down. Parchment or a silicone mat solves it, and lets you slide the whole sheet off to cool.
- Let them cool on the sheetLift them hot and they tear. Give them two or three minutes to set before moving them to a rack.
- "Eggs, beaten separately and then together"Yolks and whites beaten in separate bowls, then combined; a common older practice, generally done for lightness. With two teaspoons of baking powder in the mix you can beat the eggs whole and lose little.
- Rolled oatsUse old-fashioned rolled oats. Quick and instant oats are cut smaller and rolled thinner, so they absorb liquid faster and can make the cakes pasty rather than crisp and lacy.
- The second ingredient listThe half-cup sugar, third-cup butter, one egg, salt and single cup of oats at the end is an alternate, richer proportion printed without any method of its own. Treat it as a variant: cream, add the egg, stir in oats and salt, and drop and bake as above. Note that it carries no leavening.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cakes from the first formula, roughly half that from the second.
These are oat cakes only in the American sense — a soft drop cookie — and not the unleavened oat griddle bread of Scotland and northern England that carries the same name. The dish belongs to the decades after rolled oats became a cheap packaged staple in North America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; once oats came flaked rather than as whole or cut groats requiring long cooking, cooks began using them raw in batters, and oat drop cookies spread through community and commercial cookbooks.