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Pic-Nic Bread
Another form of the coffee cake, cheap and good for school pic-nics and the like, and for sale.
Mix a few raisins or currants in the German coffee cake dough. Roll out pieces to the size of desert plates and half inch thick, brush over with a little melted lard, double them over like large split rolls. Rise and bake like bread, and brush over with a mixture of water, egg, and sugar.
This is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have the book's German coffee cake dough, an enriched yeast dough with butter or lard, sugar, eggs and milk. Everything here is shaping and finishing.
- Start with the base doughAny moderately rich sweet yeast dough will stand in — roughly the strength of a brioche-lite or a Hefezopf; the page does not give the dough's composition, but something in the region of 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar and 4-6 tablespoons fat per pound of flour suits it. A leaner dough works too; the result is closer to a raisin bap.
- The fold is the whole pointBrushing melted fat on the round before doubling it keeps the two halves from knitting together, so the baked loaf splits cleanly along the fold. Skip the fat and you get a thick flat bun instead of a shape that pulls apart in the hand.
- Dessert plate sizeA nineteenth-century dessert plate ran to something like 7 inches, though sizes varied. Rolled half an inch thick and folded, each piece bakes into a substantial individual loaf.
- Lard, and what to use insteadMelted lard was the cheap fat of a commercial bakeshop. Melted butter or a neutral oil does the same job here; the quantity is small and the flavour difference is slight.
- Plumping the fruitCurrants and raisins as sold today are drier than they need to be for a dough this size. Soak them ten minutes in warm water and pat dry, or they will pull moisture out of the crumb around them.
- "Rise and bake like bread"The original gives no temperature or time. In modern terms, proof the shaped loaves until nearly doubled and slow to spring back, 45 minutes to an hour in a warm room, then bake at around 375F for 20-25 minutes. A sweet dough colours fast; tent with foil if the tops darken before the centres reach about 195F.
- The finishing washWater, egg and sugar beaten together is a glaze, not a filling; one egg to a tablespoon each of water and sugar is a workable ratio. The order of the sentence puts the brushing after baking rather than before, which would set it to a soft shine rather than the hard gloss of an egg wash applied before the oven.
- YieldA dough made from two pounds of flour will give six to eight loaves at this size.
"German coffee cake" in American bakeshop books of this era means the enriched yeast dough of central European tradition — Kaffeekuchen, the Sunday-morning sweet bread often said to have been brought by German immigrant bakers to the eastern and midwestern cities in the middle of the nineteenth century — not the chemically leavened crumb-topped cake the name now suggests. The phrase "and for sale" in the text suggests the recipe had a commercial use, and the logic of the page follows from it: one batch of dough, several products, no waste. Fruit and a fold turn the same dough into something that keeps its shape in a basket, splits without a knife, and sells for a few cents to schools and church outings. The picnic was by then a long-established American institution, and a baker who could supply large orders of something plain, portable and cheap had an obvious market for it.