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Nut Cakes
1 teaspoon baking-powder
2 eggs
½ cup molasses
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup flour
½ cup chopped nut-meats
Beat the eggs slightly and add the molasses and sugar. Mix and sift the flour, baking-powder and salt, and stir them into the first mixture. Add melted butter and nuts, and half fill shallow greased molds with the mixture. Place a nut-meat in the center of each. Bake in a moderate oven (360-380° F.) for twenty-five minutes.
TEA CAKES (WITH NUTS)
1 tablespoon melted fat
3 teaspoons baking-powder
I/2 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 egg
1 cup chopped nuts
1 cup milk
Cream the fat with the sugar, add the beaten egg, then add the milk alternately with the sifted ingredients. Lastly add the floured nuts. Bake in greased muffin-pans at 400-425° for twenty minutes. Split each cake, butter it, and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon or with grated maple sugar and chopped nuts. Serve hot with afternoon tea.
Two related recipes sit on this page: a molasses-sweetened nut cake baked in shallow molds, and a plainer nut tea cake baked in muffin pans. Both are quick-bread batters rather than cookie doughs, despite the section heading.
- Oven temperatures are already givenThis is a later book that prints numbers as well as adjectives: 360-380°F for the nut cakes, 400-425°F for the tea cakes. Set a modern oven to 375°F and 415°F respectively and both will behave.
- "Shallow greased molds"Probably something like gem pans or shallow patty tins rather than deep muffin cups, though the book does not specify. A standard 12-cup muffin pan filled halfway works, or mini-muffin tins for something closer to the original scale; the batter is only half-filled into the molds and bakes through in 25 minutes.
- YieldThe first recipe, on one cup of flour, makes roughly 10 to 12 small cakes. The tea cakes, on two cups of flour and a cup of milk, make about 12 standard muffins.
- Creaming one tablespoon of melted fatYou cannot cream melted fat with sugar in any real sense. Whisk them together until the sugar is damp and grainy, then proceed; the leavening here comes entirely from the three teaspoons of baking powder, not from aerated butter.
- Flouring the nutsTossing the chopped nuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in is the one instruction worth respecting. It keeps them suspended in a thin batter rather than settling into a layer at the bottom of each cake.
- Mix minimallyBoth batters are baking-powder batters. Stir the dry ingredients in only until no dry flour shows; extended beating develops gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- "Melted fat" and "grated maple sugar"Fat in an American cookbook of this period means butter, lard or a vegetable shortening interchangeably; butter is the obvious choice here. Hard maple sugar cakes are still sold and can be grated as directed, or use maple sugar granules.
- Nut choice"nut-meats" in this period often meant walnuts or hickory nuts, and pecans were widely used in the South. Walnuts suit the molasses cake particularly well; toast them first, which the original does not ask for and which markedly improves the flavour.
Butterick, best known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the same readership of home sewers and home cooks. Both cakes on this page are raised with commercial baking powder; in the molasses cake the eggs are beaten only "slightly" and do no leavening work of their own. The recipes simply say "nut-meats" and leave the choice open. Splitting a hot tea cake, buttering it and dusting it with cinnamon sugar suited afternoon tea, tea here meaning a light late-afternoon meal rather than the drink alone.