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Coffee Spice Cake
½ cup butter 2 eggs ½ cup cold coffee 2 teaspoonfuls bakingpowder 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour 2 teaspoonfuls mixed spices teaspoonful salt Cream the butter and sugar well together. Add the unbeaten eggs, one at a time, and beat the batter well. Sift together the flour, bakingpowder, salt, and spices, and add them alternately with the cold coffee. Bake in a moderate oven until the cake shrinks from the side of the pan.
Tea Punch No. 1 Boil together for five minutes a quart of water, juice of three lemons, half a cup of sugar, and the shaved yellow rind of the lemons. Add a pint of cold tea (more if liked), currant, raspberry, or grape juice, pieces of shredded pineapple (canned or fresh), and sections of oranges. Add more sugar if necessary and pieces of ice. Pour in a bottle of Apollinaris or Vichy just before serving.
Tea Punch No. 2 Pour off any left-over tea from the leaves at once, and if extra strong dilute with a little boiling water run through the teapot. To a quart of such liquid add one-half cup of lemon-juice, and sugar to sweeten as desired. Stir until the sugar is entirely dissolved. Remove the rind and bitter white portion from one small orange, cut into thin slices, and each slice into quarter sections. Add this to the tea and set away to get very cold.
A plain butter cake leaning on leftover breakfast coffee for its liquid, with spice to match. The method is standard creaming, so the only real decisions are oven heat and pan size.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. The recipe's own test is that the cake shrinks from the side of the pan; a skewer coming out clean will confirm it. Expect roughly 30-35 minutes in a single 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, longer in a loaf.
- Pan and yieldThe quantities make one 8- or 9-inch layer or a small loaf, serving roughly eight. Grease and flour the pan, or line the base with paper.
- The coffeePlain brewed coffee, cold, left from the pot. Do not use undiluted espresso.
- Mixed spicesIn books of this period this usually indicates a domestic blend of cinnamon with smaller amounts of nutmeg, cloves, allspice and sometimes ginger. Two teaspoons of a commercial pumpkin-pie or mixed-spice blend works, or mix your own from about half cinnamon.
- SaltThe salt quantity in the ingredient line has no number attached. Half a teaspoon suits this amount of flour.
- Unbeaten eggsAdding the eggs whole and one at a time into the creamed butter is deliberate: each is beaten in until the mixture is smooth again, which keeps the emulsion from breaking. If it curdles, add a spoonful of the measured flour.
- Alternating dry and wetThe recipe adds the dry mixture alternately with the coffee; beginning and ending with the flour is the usual way of doing it, and mixing should stop as soon as the last flour disappears.
Cakes moistened with cold coffee belong to a long line of thrift baking in which yesterday's beverage stands in for milk. Coffee was expensive enough to be worth saving and, unlike milk, leftover coffee kept safely on the sideboard all day; its slight bitterness suited the heavily spiced, brown-sugar-and-cloves style of cake that dominated American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward. Books devoted to left-overs flourished in the 1910s and 1920s when food-conservation campaigns turned household economy into something close to a civic duty, and a chapter that could absorb the dregs of the coffee pot, the tea pot and the fruit bowl in the same few pages was exactly the point of the genre.