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Horseshoes
Use Cinnamon Bar mixture. Cover with frosting colored with fruit red. Cut in strips six inches long by one-half fruit red. Cut in strips six inches long by one-half inch wide. As soon as cut, shape quickly, at the same time carefully, in form of horseshoes. Bake same as Cinnamon Bars. When cool, make eight dots with chocolate frosting to represent nails.
A shaped variant rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the Cinnamon Bar dough and frosting from elsewhere in the book and turns them into a novelty cookie. A few things need translating before you can work from it.
- The text is garbledThe line "Cut in strips six inches long by one-half fruit red" is a printer's or scanner's duplication. Read it as: cover with red-tinted frosting, then cut in strips six inches long by half an inch wide.
- You need the Cinnamon Bar recipe firstThis entry is meaningless on its own: the dough, the frosting and the baking are all borrowed from it. From the instructions here, the Cinnamon Bar method evidently involves a rolled dough covered with frosting, cut into strips, and baked frosting and all; look the recipe up before starting rather than relying on a reconstruction of it.
- Frosting goes on before bakingThat is the part that surprises modern cooks: the frosting is spread over the raw dough and bakes with it. Judging by the method it must be a thin sugar-and-egg-white type icing that sets dry rather than a buttercream, which would melt -- but check the Cinnamon Bar recipe for what is actually specified.
- "Fruit red"A commercial food colouring of the period, sold ready-made; period reds were variously cochineal- or coal-tar-based. Any modern red will do; gel colour is stronger than the old liquids, so add it a drop at a time to the frosting.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time at all; "Bake same as Cinnamon Bars" sends you to that recipe, and whatever it specifies is what you should follow. The practical aim is that the frosting sets dry without browning, since a hot oven will colour the glaze and dull the red.
- Work fast, but do not stretchThe hinge of the whole thing. Cut and bend the strips while the dough is still soft and the icing still tacky; once the sheet firms up the strips crack at the curve. Bend each one over the side of your thumb rather than pulling the ends around.
- The nailsEight dots of chocolate frosting, piped once the cookies are completely cool; the recipe does not say how they are spaced. A paper cone or a zip bag with a pinhole gives cleaner dots than a spoon.
- YieldNot given, and not calculable from this page: it depends entirely on how large a sheet the Cinnamon Bar batch covers.
Fancy shaped cookies like this fit the turn-of-the-century taste for novelty sweets at children's parties, card parties and church suppers, where a plain spice dough could be cut into hearts, stars, crescents and horseshoes and iced to match. The horseshoe as a luck token is old and widely attested in European folk custom, and it appears often in late Victorian and Edwardian decorative work, on greeting cards, wedding favours and bonbon boxes. Books of this school are full of small variations, one mixture recast several ways under different names, which tells you something about how it was taught: learn the mixture, then learn what can be done with it.