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Cinnamon Cake
When yeast bread is ready to knead from the sponge, knead and roll out three-fourths of an inch thick, put thin slices of butter on the top, sprinkle with cinnamon, and then with sugar; let rise well and bake.-Misc M. E. Wilcox, Selma, Alabama.
This is a borrowed-dough recipe: it assumes you already have a batch of yeast bread going and simply diverts part of it. The instructions are skeletal even by the standards of the book, so most of the work is filling in quantities and a temperature.
- What "ready to knead from the sponge" meansNineteenth-century bread was often built in two stages: a loose sponge of flour, water and yeast left to ferment, then more flour worked in to make a kneadable dough. The cake is made from that dough at the point where it has just been brought together, before its first full rise.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Roughly a pound of dough, about a third of a standard two-loaf batch, is a workable amount; rolled three-quarters of an inch thick it will cover something like an eight-inch square pan or a small round tin.
- Butter and sugar amountsThe original gives none. Figure 4 tablespoons of butter in thin slices, 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar and 1 to 2 teaspoons of cinnamon for a pound of dough. Mixing the cinnamon into the sugar first gives a more even coating than sprinkling them separately, though the separate method is what is written.
- "Let rise well"A rise of 45 minutes to an hour in a warm room, until the dough is visibly puffed and a fingertip dent springs back slowly. Underproofed, it bakes into a dense slab rather than a soft cake.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is well browned and the butter has pooled and set into the surface.
- Don't press the butter inThe slices are meant to sit on top and melt down into dimples during the rise and bake. Working them into the dough turns this into an enriched bread and loses the pocked, sugary crust that is the point of the thing.
- ServingCut into squares and eaten warm, the day it is made. It stales quickly, as any lean bread dough will.
This belongs to the large American family of dishes made by stealing a piece of the weekly bread dough and treating it as something else -- the same impulse that produced sugar cake, lardy cake and the Pennsylvania and Moravian sugar cakes topped with butter, sugar and cinnamon. Before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, a household that already had a sponge working had free leavening on hand, and the cook's only cost was butter and spice. The recipe's brevity assumes a reader who bakes bread often enough that no further explanation is needed. Like many entries in this book, it is credited to a contributor by name and town.