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Westphalian Butter Cakes
Sift 3 pounds flour, add 2 cups sugar, 7 eggs well beaten, zest of 1 lemon, 1/2 pint milk, and 1/2 pound of melted butter. Mix the butter with the sugar, add the eggs, then the milk and flour. Beat all well, spread on buttered pans, and set to rise. Butter the tops, dust with sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts, prick with a fork here and there, and bake till done. Serve hot, cut in slices, for lunch or tea.
This is Butterkuchen, a yeast-raised sheet cake, and the recipe as printed leaves out its leaven entirely — the instruction to "set to rise" is the only clue that anything should be raising it. Read the notes before scaling anything.
- The missing yeastNothing in the ingredient list can make this rise; the phrase "set to rise" only makes sense with yeast, which appears to have been omitted somewhere between kitchen and print. Recipes of this type generally use something on the order of one cake of compressed yeast (about 2 teaspoons instant) per pound of flour, softened in a little of the warmed milk. Without it you get a dense, heavy slab.
- Scale downThree pounds of flour is about 11 cups and will fill about two half-sheet pans at the depth described. Quartering the whole recipe — 12 oz flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup milk, 2 oz butter — gives one 9x13 pan.
- Half a pint of milkThat is one cup. Warm it to about 110F if you are adding yeast, and note that one cup against three pounds of flour is very little liquid even with seven eggs; a yeasted dough of this size normally wants closer to a pint. Expect to add milk until the dough is soft and slightly sticky rather than stiff.
- Butter and sugarThe butter is melted, so "mix the butter with the sugar" is not creaming — it is simply stirring them together. Half a pound is two sticks.
- Spread thinThe dough goes into the pan about half an inch deep, not as a loaf. Press it out with buttered fingertips rather than a rolling pin.
- RisingCovered, in a warm room, 45 minutes to an hour until visibly puffed. The topping goes on after the rise, immediately before baking, or the sugar draws moisture and the surface slackens.
- The fork holesPricking is not decorative. The dimples hold the melted butter and sugar so they pool and caramelize into the crumb instead of running off the edge.
- OvenBake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes for a half-inch layer, until the top is deep gold and the sugar has gone glassy at the dimples. The recipe itself gives no temperature, only "bake till done."
- ServingGenuinely best warm, cut in squares or fingers, the same day it is made. It stales fast because the crumb is lean apart from the surface butter.
Butterkuchen — sometimes Zuckerkuchen — is the standard afternoon-coffee cake of Westphalia and the Rhineland: a yeasted dough pressed flat in a sheet pan, dimpled, buttered and strewn with sugar, cinnamon and nuts or almonds. It belongs to the older tradition of baking sweet dough alongside the bread, in a hot bread oven, which is why the dough is bread dough enriched with eggs and butter rather than a batter.