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German Kauglauff
1 pound of light dough. 1 pound of flour. 1 pound of butter. 6 ounces of sugar. 1 pound of currants. 8 whole eggs and 8 yolks. Half cup of milk or cream. Extract of lemon. Ground cinnamon.
Mix up like Polish cake, the cream and currants last, and rise in the moulds. When done pass a brush dipped in sugar and milk over the cakes and dredge them with the ground cinnamon mixed with sugar. Use to slice cold.
A yeast-risen Kugelhopf in the professional idiom of the period: the baker is assumed to have a bowl of fermented bread dough already going and a rack of fluted tube moulds waiting. The quantities are shop-sized and the oven is left entirely to your judgement.
- The pound of light doughThis is a piece of ordinary risen bread dough taken from the day's batch, used as the leaven — there is no separate yeast in the list. Substitute a firm sponge made from about 2 cups flour, 2/3 cup water and a teaspoon of instant yeast, fermented until doubled and slightly slack.
- Mix up like Polish cakeThe book assumes you already know its Polish cake method, which is not repeated here; the likely sequence is butter and sugar creamed, eggs worked in gradually, then flour and the broken-up leaven, with the liquid and fruit folded in at the end. Adding the milk and currants last keeps the dough from turning heavy and stops the fruit bruising and streaking.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. A pound is a great deal of fruit for this batter; dredge them in a little of the weighed flour so they suspend rather than sink to what becomes the crown of the cake.
- Extract of lemon and cinnamonNo amounts are given, as was usual in trade books. Reckon on 1 to 2 teaspoons lemon extract and a rounded teaspoon of cinnamon for a batch this size; the extract of the period was more variable in strength than what you will buy now.
- The mouldsKugelhopf moulds are deep, fluted and central-tubed — a Bundt or Turk's-head pan is the direct descendant. Butter heavily and fill no more than halfway, then let the dough rise to within an inch of the rim before baking.
- OvenNone is specified. Bake at 350F; a large mould will need 45 to 60 minutes, smaller ones 30 to 35. The internal temperature should reach about 200F, and the cake will sound hollow when the pan is rapped.
- The glazeBrush the sugar-and-milk wash on while the cakes are still hot so it sets to a thin film, then dust at once with the cinnamon sugar so it adheres. On a cooled cake it will sit damp on the surface instead of drying to a film.
- YieldThe raw batter comes to something near six pounds — one very large mould or three of ordinary Bundt size. Halving throughout is straightforward. The closing note is worth heeding: 'Use to slice cold' — this is a keeping cake, served in cold slices rather than warm.
Kugelhopf — spelled kauglauff, gugelhupf, kouglof and a dozen other ways depending on who was writing — is the tall fluted yeast cake of Alsace, Austria and southern Germany, and its name is generally traced to the old German words for a ball or hood (Gugel) and a rise or leap (Hupf), describing the shape of the mould. Enriched yeast cakes of this kind sat between bread and pastry in the nineteenth-century bakeshop, which is exactly why the recipe begins with a pound of the baker's own risen dough rather than with yeast: it was made from what was already on the bench. American pastry books of the late 1800s carried such recipes at a time when German and Austrian bakers are often said to have been a strong presence in the trade in the large cities, and the cake was, by the direction on the page, to be sliced cold.