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Savarin Cake (Preceding without the fruit)
The preceding without the fruit. Used hot as a cake pudding with liqueur sauce. With dough from the breakfast rolls at 7 o'clock it can be made ready for midday dinner.
A French authority says Kauglauff or Kugeloff, is a general name in German for all cakes made with yeast. Perhaps the common term "coffee cake" is but the attempt of English speaking tongues at "Kauglauff." The cheapest and commonest coffee cake has been described as a warm bread several columns back. We now give two varieties that are really rich cakes by the same name.
This entry is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it directs you back to the preceding cake, minus the fruit, and adds the serving idea and a note on naming. Read it alongside the recipe above it, or the quantities will be missing.
- It is not self-containedEverything but the omission of fruit and the liqueur sauce lives in the preceding recipe. Any modern attempt needs that page for flour, butter, eggs and yeast quantities.
- What a savarin isGenerally a yeast-risen, butter-and-egg enriched dough baked in a ring mould and moistened with sweetened spirit syrup. Note that this entry itself specifies nothing about mould shape or soaking: only that the fruit is omitted and that it is served hot with liqueur sauce.
- "Dough from the breakfast rolls"The author assumes enriched roll dough is already to hand at 7 o'clock. In a home kitchen this would mean a basic sweet or brioche-style dough; further enrichment with butter, eggs and sugar is a modern guess, not something the entry specifies.
- The 7 a.m. to midday windowFour to five hours covers a slow bulk rise, shaping, a proof in the mould and baking. Yeast dough this rich rises sluggishly; keep it around 78F rather than pushing it with heat, or the butter weeps out.
- OvenThe entry gives no oven term, temperature or time. A modern baker would treat a ring cake of this kind as a moderate oven, roughly 350F for 25 to 35 minutes depending on mould size, baking to a good colour.
- Liqueur sauceThe entry does not specify one. A period liqueur sauce would typically be a sweetened syrup or sauce flavoured with a spirit such as rum, kirsch or maraschino, served warm over the warm cake; any quantity is guesswork.
- ServingServed hot as a "cake pudding" with liqueur sauce it functions as a dessert course, although the passage itself files these rich cakes under the coffee-cake name. No mould size or yield is given.
The savarin is generally traced to Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, where pâtissiers adapted the older rum-soaked baba into a ring shape and attached the name of Brillat-Savarin, author of the Physiologie du goût; the mould that bears the name is usually taken to follow from the cake rather than the reverse. The author's aside about Kauglauff is a genuine period observation about a family of Alsatian and German yeast cakes — kugelhopf, gugelhupf and their many spellings — but the suggestion that "coffee cake" is an English mangling of the word is folk etymology; the plainer explanation is a direct translation of Kaffeekuchen, cake eaten with coffee.