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Brown Sugar Buns
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon shortening 1/2 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup brown sugar Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; add shortening and rub in very lightly; add milk slowly to make a soft dough; roll out 1/4 inch thick. Have butter soft and spread over dough; cover with brown sugar. Roll same as jelly roll; cut into 2-inch pieces and place with cut edges up on well greased pan. Bake in moderate oven about 30 minutes; remove from pan at once.
A baking-powder dough rolled with butter and brown sugar — essentially a quick-bread cinnamon roll without the cinnamon or the yeast. It comes together in fifteen minutes, but the proportions are of their period and a few need adjusting.
- Line the pan, and mean itThe sugar melts and runs to the bottom, where it sets hard as it cools. "Remove from pan at once" is the hinge of the recipe: parchment under the buns saves you scraping caramel out of the tin. Lift them off within a minute of leaving the oven.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat 2-inch buns may well be done before the stated 30 minutes -- check when the tops are set and lightly browned, since a lean biscuit dough dries out.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour reflects the single-acting cream-of-tartar powders this book was written to sell. With modern double-acting powder use 2 to 3 teaspoons; more than that leaves a soapy, metallic aftertaste.
- The milk is shortHalf a cup will not bring two cups of flour to a soft rollable dough. Expect to need 3/4 cup or a little more; add it slowly as directed and stop when the dough just holds together.
- ShorteningA tablespoon of lard or vegetable shortening was intended. Butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Butter for the fillingOne tablespoon spread over a sheet of dough 1/4 inch thick is a scrape. Two to three tablespoons, genuinely soft, gives the sugar something to bind with rather than shedding it dry when you slice.
- Brown sugarUse light brown, packed. Period brown sugar was often moister and less uniform than today's; if yours is at all hardened, soften it first or it will sit in gritty pockets.
- YieldA jelly-roll cut into 2-inch pieces gives only a handful of buns, depending on how wide you roll the sheet. Best eaten the day they are made.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which for decades distributed free recipe booklets naming its product in every ingredient list. The recipe itself is a chemically leavened shortcut to a yeasted sweet roll: instead of a sponge and two risings, a biscuit dough is rolled, buttered, sugared and spiraled the way a jelly roll is, an analogy the writer assumes every reader will recognize without further explanation. Brown sugar rather than cinnamon-and-white does the flavoring.