Home › Bread and Rolls › Royal Individual Coffee Cakes
Royal Individual Coffee Cakes
2 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons sugar 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 4 tablespoons shortening 1 egg 3/8 cup milk Sift dry ingredients together; rub in shortening lightly with finger tips; add beaten egg to milk and add to dry ingredients to make soft dough; divide the dough into six long narrow pieces; with hands roll out on board each piece very long and thin; spread with butter; cut each in two and beginning in center twist two pieces together and bring ends around to form crescent. Put into greased pan; sprinkle with chopped nuts. Bake in hot oven 15 to 20 minutes. While hot, brush over with thin icing made with 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar moistened with 1 tablespoon hot water.
A quick baking-powder dough shaped like a yeast pastry, from one of the Royal Baking Powder Company's promotional cookbooks. It comes together in about ten minutes and wants a hot oven and a light hand.
- The hinge: keep the dough soft and work it fastThis is a biscuit dough, not a bread dough, and it toughens if kneaded or re-rolled. Bring it together just until it coheres, then roll the strands out in one pass so the crescents stay tender.
- 3/8 cup milkSix tablespoons. Have a little more at hand — flour absorbency varies and the dough should be soft enough to roll into thin ropes without cracking.
- Hot ovenIn the usage of the period roughly 400 to 450F; 425F is a fair reading. At 15 to 20 minutes the cakes should be well browned.
- ShorteningIn the usage of these booklets this means any solid fat: lard, butter or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco. Butter gives good flavour here; rub it in cold, as for scones.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is a heavy hand by modern standards, where a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a quarter per cup is usual; a single-acting cream-of-tartar powder such as Royal also released its gas all at once, in the bowl. Modern powder at this rate can leave a faint metallic edge; two teaspoons is closer to current practice.
- Spread with butterSoftened, not melted — melted butter runs off the thin strands and pools in the pan. It is what separates the twisted layers, so spread it right to the edges.
- Chopped nutsSprinkled on before baking in a hot oven, nuts scorch easily; press them in lightly and check at ten minutes.
- YieldSix crescents, each made from a strand cut in two and twisted. Best eaten within a few hours; this kind of quick dough stales fast.
This comes from a cookbook published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a long line of branded recipe booklets American manufacturers gave away from the late nineteenth century onward to teach cooks to use their product and to name it in every ingredient list. The dish itself is often said to borrow its shape from the Central European yeasted Kaffeekuchen tradition that German and Austrian immigrants brought to American kitchens strstrewn and glazed several h yeast and its several hours of rising with chemical leavening, which is precisely the argument such booklets existed to make. "Coffee cake" in this sense means a cake eaten with coffee rather than one flavoured with it, a usage generally traced to that same German-American inheritance.