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Another Coffee Cake
Cream 1 cup of butter and 1/2 cups of sugar, add 2 beaten eggs, 1 cup of cold coffee, 1/2 cup of honey, 1 teaspoon of soda, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of cloves, 4 cups of flour, add as many raisins and currants as you like. Let stand twenty minutes before baking.
A spiced fruit loaf leavened with soda and enriched with honey and brewed coffee — not the crumb-topped breakfast cake the name suggests today. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the two things it never states are the pan and the temperature.
- The sugar is ambiguous"1/2 cups of sugar" against a full cup of butter and four cups of flour reads like a typesetter's loss of a leading figure, and 1 1/2 cups would suit the proportions better. Half a cup would give a distinctly plain, bread-like cake. Either reading will bake; take 1 1/2 unless you want the leaner version.
- Oven and panThe recipe states neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; grease and line the pan, and test with a skewer at the centre, since honey cakes brown early and can look done well before they are. Judge quantity and timing by the pan you choose.
- "Coffee cake" means coffeeThe cup of cold coffee is a liquid ingredient, not an accompaniment. Use strong brewed coffee, cooled; cold leftover coffee would serve the purpose. Baked, it tends to read as a dark note alongside the spice rather than as coffee flavour.
- Soda with no acid to speak ofA teaspoon of soda has only the honey and coffee to react with, both weakly acidic at best. Expect a dense, close-grained loaf. If you want lift, sift the soda thoroughly through the flour so it is not left in pockets, which is where the soapy taste comes from.
- The twenty-minute restThe recipe does not say why it was wanted; standing would let the flour hydrate and the soda begin to work. There is little to gain by extending it much, since gas raised before the loaf sees heat is gas lost.
- FlourThe soft winter-wheat flour of the period is not the same as modern all-purpose. Measuring by weight is safer (roughly 480 g for four modern cups), and hold back the last half-cup if the batter is already stiff enough to mound on the spoon.
- Fruit"as many as you like" leaves it open; 1 to 2 cups total of raisins and currants suits this batter. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they may settle in a batter this heavy.
- KeepingHoney is hygroscopic, so the loaf holds its moisture and is often better after a day wrapped tightly; it should stay good for several days at room temperature.
In American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a "coffee cake" was as often a cake containing coffee as one served beside it; both senses of the name circulated, the German-style yeasted Kaffeekuchen with its streusel crown alongside the plainer English one. Honey seems to have substituted readily for part of the sugar in soda-raised loaves and would have had the practical advantage of keeping the crumb moist for the better part of a week. The heavy hand with cinnamon and cloves, and the vague "as many raisins and currants as you like," both suggest the cake's ancestry in the English spiced fruit loaf, thinned down and speeded up for a cook working with soda rather than yeast.