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German Coffee Cake
1 cake yeast. 3/4 cup luke warm water. 1 1/2 cups flour. Dissolve yeast in water; add flour, beat well, let rise to nearly double its double its bulk, then add one-fourth cup butter creamed with one-third cup sugar, two beaten eggs. Add one-half cup Sultana raisins and flour enough to make stiff batter, or enough to knead like bread. Let rise, work down, and spread in buttered pans, making dough about one-half inch thick. When light put in oven, sprinkle with sugar and chopped nuts. Brush top with melted butter before sugar and nuts are put on bread. Some cover with coating made of confectioners' sugar and water made into a paste. This recipe can be rolled out, cut in shapes and made into sweet rusks by adding one-half cup sugar, a few more raisins and nuts.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough sweet bread; the recipe assumes a baker who knows what "light" looks like and never states an oven temperature. The points below fill in what Mrs. Wilson left to experience.
- "1 cake yeast"Compressed yeast cakes were commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied; one standard packet of active dry or instant yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons) is the usual modern substitute. "Luke warm" water is roughly 95-105F.
- The sponge stageYeast, water and 1 1/2 cups flour make a wet sponge, not a dough. Letting it rise to nearly double before the butter, sugar and eggs go in is deliberate: fat and sugar slow fermentation, so the yeast is given a head start on plain flour and water.
- Flour quantity is open-ended"Flour enough to make stiff batter, or enough to knead like bread" is genuinely ambiguous, and the two are different doughs. For a coffee cake spread half an inch thick in a pan, aim for the stiffer batter end -- roughly another 1 1/2 to 2 cups, soft and slightly tacky.
- Sultana raisinsSold as sultanas in Britain and Commonwealth countries; the nearest American equivalent is the golden raisin, though modern golden raisins are usually sulphured Thompson seedless rather than the sultana grape.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A rich sweet dough of this kind bakes at 350-375F; the sugar and butter on top will colour fast, so watch the surface rather than the clock. A half-inch sheet is done in roughly 20-25 minutes.
- Order of the toppingRead the instruction backwards as written: brush the risen dough with melted butter first, then the sugar and chopped nuts. The butter is what keeps the sugar in place.
- The icing is an either/orThe icing appears to be an alternative finish rather than an addition -- "Some cover with" points to a different practice, though the recipe does not say so outright. If you use it, apply it after baking while the cake is still warm; sugar-and-nuts goes on before.
- The rusk variationAdding half a cup more sugar plus extra fruit and nuts makes a firmer dough for rolling and cutting into shapes. The recipe gives no drying or second-baking step, and "rusk" in American cookbooks of this period often meant simply a sweet raised bun rather than a twice-baked dried bread.
- YieldAt the specified half-inch thickness the dough fills roughly two 9-inch square pans; 12 to 16 servings.
What German bakers call Blechkuchen -- sheet-pan cake -- travelled to America with nineteenth-century German immigration and settled into the English-language cookbooks as "coffee cake," meaning not a cake containing coffee but one eaten alongside it. It is a yeast dough enriched with butter, sugar and eggs, closer to a brioche than to anything leavened with baking powder. The topping of butter, sugar and chopped nuts is the plainest version of a finish that in Germany runs to crumb, cheese and fruit. Mrs. Wilson is generally said to have written for the Philadelphia press and, during the First World War, in a food-administration vein, and her instructions carry that voice throughout -- economical, assuming a competent cook, and quick to offer a second use for the same dough.