Bettina's Cakes – GS Berger

This is a slight adaptation of an awesome muffin recipe—simply titled “Bettina's Cakes”—from one of the most awesome cookbooks ever published in English—“A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband With Bettina's Best Recipes”—written by Louise Weaver and Helen LeCron and published in early 1917. It's an interesting take on spice cakes from an even earlier era when chemical leavening wasn't completely understood or trusted, which as given makes eight muffins, but I've successfully doubled and tripled it to make larger batches, and it scales just fine.

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Bettina's Cakes

Recipe:

Measure out 1/3 cup of milk, and add to this one-half tablespoon vinegar. Stir and let sit.

Preheat your oven to 350F / 175C.

Grease your muffin tin.

Melt two tablespoons of butter.

In a mixing bowl, stir together:

1 cup flour

1/3 cup granulated sugar

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon powdered cloves

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

a pinch of salt

Add to this one egg and the sour milk, stir everything together and beat with a wooden spoon for one minute. Pour in the melted butter, and beat for two minutes more.

Fill muffin cups half full—it should half-fill eight normal-sized cups, neatly fitting in a normal twelve-hole muffin tin without using the corners—and bake for about twenty minutes. They're done when they pull away from the sides of the cups.

Rebecca always hurts the ones she loves. Except, okay, she didn't even like Emily and she only broke the other girl's nosetwice, but, still. Eager—nay, desperate—to make amends for these accidental injuries, she reluctantly agreed to drive her victim on a road trip over an extended weekend, shortly before they both graduate from high school. All she wanted was forgiveness, an easing of her troubled conscience. Never could Rebecca have guessed that her tall, quiet classmate was into women—or that she's exactly Emily's type...

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