One Hundred Years Ago...
* the average house cost $7,019
* the BBC was founded
* Camel cigarettes appeared, and for the first time women in general began to take up the habit about this time
* America was introduced to Betty Crocker baked goods, Eskimo Pies, and Mounds, Baby Ruth, and Oh Henry candy bars!.
* we also started our love affair with fast food when the world's first hamburger chain, White Castle, opened for business
(Note: not a period of growth in healthful diet! Good thing that sanitation, at least, had so vastly improved by this time!)
* bread cost 10 cents a loaf (not pre-sliced yet)
* gas was 11 cents a gallon
* milk was 58 cents a quart
* and COFFEE cost .35 a pound, whole bean or .15 a cup at the neighborhood diner
X Marks the Spot
And here's where I qualify for Sepia Saturday today! (Wink!) If you love coffee like I do and it's a special treat to have a coffee-shop-style latte, but you're sensitive to dairy products, here's a coffee hack: Xanthum gum! A binder and thickening agent common in prepared foods, it's derived from the fermentation of glucose and sucrose (to put it simply), and is considered generally safe as an additive. You'll find it as a typical ingredient in gluten-free products, it's in baked goods and pasta and can be found in sauces and salad dressings as a thickening agents. It's commonly found in ice cream, too, to prevent the formation of ice crystals.
Check out the recipe for dairy free lattes on this video! *Don't be freaked out when the video producers explain the bacteria aspect of Xanthum Gum; gross as it sounds, you've been ingesting it your whole life, undoubtedly! (Bob's Red Mill supplies Xanthum Gum if you want to have a go at this latte!)
Coffee Lovers Coffee Cake
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| What we'd be wearing while we drank our coffee and ate our coffee cake! |
1/3 cup sugar
4 tsp instant coffee granules
1-11/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Batter
3 Tbs butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda,
1/8 tsp salt 1 cup plain yogurt
2 Tbs chopped walnuts
* Preheat oven to 350°. Mix sugar, coffee granules and cinnamon. In a large bowl, beat
butter and sugar until crumbly, about 2 minutes. Beat in egg and vanilla. In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; add to butter mixture alternately with yogurt, beating just until blended. (Batter will be thick.)
* Spread half of the batter evenly into an 8" square baking pan coated with cooking spray; sprinkle with half the coffee mixture. Top with remaining batter; sprinkle with remaining coffee mixture. Cut through batter with knife to swirl. Sprinkle with nuts.
* Bake 25 -30 minutes, until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 25 - 30 minutes.
Enjoy!
Run over to Sepia Saturday to find out what other spots the letter X marks in history!
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| Saturday morning coffee cup klink to my handsome young Dad, circa 1950! I miss our Saturday morning Village Inn breakfasts -- where he would always insist that the waitress fill his cup to the tippity-top! I don't pour a cup of coffee ever without thinking of him! |
7 comments:
Creative take on the letter X! I'm not a coffee lover, but I like coffee cake and don't mind the coffee flavor in sweets. I'm enjoying the variety of takes on the prompt.
You snuck that 'X' right in there so nicely! :) I have to avoid using sugar as much as possible, so I use Sucralose. Luckily for all of us who need to do things slightly differently there are ways to do it so we can still enjoy the things we like! I'm a coffee-of-all-kinds lover for sure. As to the price of things, I love telling my kids and grandkids in the '60s I could go to the store with a dollar and come home with a pound of hamburger, a loaf of bread, and a quart of milk with change left over! (a few pennies, but still, change!) Everything is relevant, though. I was only making $275. a month as a clerk/typist, so good thing I could buy a lot of food for low prices. I rented a nice roomy one bdrm apartment only two blocks from a big shopping mall for only $93.50 a month, too.
I do love my coffee, and recently found a fat-free half and half creamer...there's some corn syrup in it I am pretty sure...but no fat anyway! I prefer it to real sweeteners. I'll eat coffee cake too, but probably shouldn't!
Do you remember the coffee slogan, "Fill it to the rim with Brim"? Sounds like your dad's motto.
I've actually heard of xanthum gum thanks to being a fan of "Top Chef" many moons ago. One of the chefs kept using it - probably Marcel.
Another original response to this week’s prompt. I enjoyed your timeline list of events in 1921 and the way you led up to the X word! I ‘m afraid I am another person who has never liked or drunk coffee. One person asked me how on earth did you get through your student days without drinking coffee? But I did!
Nicely done! I've seen Xanthum gum on the ingredients label but never knew it's puroose. Better living through chemistry, I suppose.
Great take on the X prompt! And how about those 1921 prices. I don't know which surprised me more -- how low the prices were, or that 1921 was indeed 100 years ago! I tend to think of 1921 as "modern times" when researching ancestors in the 1800s :-)
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