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Almond Drop Cakes
3 cups pastry flour 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon cinnamon Pinch of salt 3/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup blanched and chopped almonds Yolks of 3 eggs 2/3 cup melted butter 2/3 cup milk (scant) 2 eggs Sift flour once, then measure, add baking powder, cinnamon and salt and sift three times, then put in a mixing bowl. Add sugar, nuts, then eggs, butter, then milk and flour, beat all together thoroughly, drop in small spoonfuls on well oiled pan and bake in a medium oven until light brown.
POS 1 cup molasses
A drop cookie in all but name, from one of the baking-powder company booklets that flooded American kitchens in the early twentieth century. The method is unusually terse even by the standards of the genre, and two things in it need sorting out before you start.
- The stray last line"POS 1 cup molasses" is a printing artifact — a fragment of the next recipe or a compositor's note that bled into this one. There is no molasses in an almond drop cake made with white sugar and cinnamon. Ignore it.
- Five eggs, not threeThe ingredient list calls for the yolks of 3 eggs and then 2 whole eggs, and the method says only "then eggs." Add all of them together at that point. The result is a rich, soft batter closer to a madeleine than a sugar cookie.
- "Medium oven"350°F. If your cakes are spreading into one another before they colour, go to 375°F, which is still within what the period would have called medium. Bake 10-14 minutes for small spoonfuls, until the edges are light brown and the tops spring back.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose — roughly 8-9 percent. Substitute by replacing two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or accept a slightly tougher cake.
- Sift, then measureThe instruction is deliberate and matters here. Flour scooped straight from the bag measures heavy; sifted-then-measured flour runs about 4 oz to the cup, so three cups is roughly 12 oz / 340 g. Weighing sidesteps the problem entirely.
- Blanching almondsPour boiling water over raw almonds, let them stand a minute, and the skins slip off between your fingers. Dry them well before chopping or they will bleed moisture into the batter. Blanched slivered almonds from a packet, chopped, work identically.
- Well oiled panA greased sheet was standard; parchment is better and prevents the buttery bottoms from over-browning. Leave two inches between spoonfuls — this batter spreads.
- YieldSeveral dozen small cakes from teaspoon-sized drops; three cups of flour makes a large batch. They are best the day they are baked and stale quickly, being high in butter and egg with no invert sugar to hold moisture.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and like the Royal, Rumford and Davis booklets of the same era it existed to sell tins of leavening — hence "3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder" rather than simply "baking powder," and hence the insistence on level measurement, a habit the standardising cookery writers of the 1890s and 1900s worked hard to instill. The combination of chopped almonds, cinnamon and egg yolks recalls German and Austrian almond baking, though nothing in the booklet ties the recipe to that tradition. Almonds were often bought whole and unblanched, which may be why the recipe still bothers to specify blanching.