Spanish Buns
Two and one-half cups brown sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 cup sour milk, 4 eggs (saving the whites for frosting), 2½ cups flour, 1 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 teaspoon cloves, 1 teaspoon vanilla; bake in a dripping pan; cut in squares and pour frosting over. Mix as for cake. 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 cups pastry flour SPICE CAKE-Exceptionally Good 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon salt cup water Yolks of 4 eggs, or 2 whole ones Cream butter and sugar thoroughly, and add eggs. Sift together three times flour, baking powder, spices and salt, and add alternately with water.
A spiced sheet cake despite the name, baked in a shallow pan and cut into squares. The batter is a straightforward sour-milk-and-soda cake, so the two things to get right are the acid and the pan.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which pasteurised milk will not reliably become. Use 1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk; there is no other leavening. Sift it with the flour rather than dumping it in, or you get dark bitter streaks.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting or sheet pan. A 9x13-inch pan gives a cake roughly an inch to an inch and a half deep, which is right for cutting in squares.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 350F for 30 to 35 minutes in a 9x13 pan, until a tester comes out clean and the centre springs back.
- EggsFour yolks go into the batter and the four whites are reserved for the frosting. Beat the yolks well before adding; the batter is heavy with brown sugar and needs the air.
- Brown sugarTwo and a half cups is a lot of sugar for two and a half cups of flour, and it makes a moist, almost fudgy crumb. Pack it lightly rather than firmly or the batter turns stiff.
- The frostingNo frosting recipe is given. A boiled icing suits it: pour hot syrup over the beaten whites as they whip, which sets to a firm shell over the warm cake and is preferable to a wholly uncooked white icing, though it does not guarantee the whites reach a safe temperature throughout.
- YieldA 9x13 pan cut into squares gives 20 to 24 pieces. They keep three or four days covered, and improve on the second day as the spices settle.
History: Spanish buns have little discernible connection to Spain, and by the late nineteenth century little to a bun. Earlier English and American recipe collections generally give the name to a yeast-raised sweet roll rich with butter and eggs; in nineteenth-century American books the name is also found attached to a spiced cake baked in a dripping pan and cut in squares, which is what it means here. The version above belongs to the sour-milk school of American home baking, in which milk turning on its own was a resource rather than a loss and soda was the cheap, reliable way to make a batter rise. Compiled collections of this kind, gathered from local contributors, are often where such older names linger.