Moravian Sugar Cake

Moravian Sugar Cake is something I’d heard of through the years, but didn’t really think about until we moved to North Carolina. Every Christmas we’ve been here, someone mentions going to the Moravian church to purchase cakes made by Dewey’s in Winston-Salem. It happened again yesterday. Our neighbor dropped by with shortbread and mentioned she’d hoped to bring a Moravian Sugar Cake but couldn’t get one. We thanked her for the shortbread and told her we’d try to make the Moravian Sugar Cake ourselves. And we did, thanks to Classic Home Desserts.

What Is Moravian Sugar Cake?

So what is Moravian Sugar Cake? I always associated it with stollen or a more time consuming pastry, but really it’s just a very light textured yeasted coffee cake with crispy cinnamon sugar top. It’s like soft and fluffy cinnamon rolls in cake form, but even easier because you don’t have to roll and cut the dough. The only drawback to the recipe we chose it that it’s so easy you’ll want to make it over and over in a million different ways. Or maybe that’s just me. This is a habit I need to break in 2023 — making one thing and then trying to do it again differently. This is a good, solid recipe that doesn’t need changes.

Classic Home Desserts Moravian Sugar Cake

The recipe is from Classice Home Desserts by the late Richard Sax who says the recipe was “unearthed” by Karyl Bannister of the Cook & Tell newsletter, which I’m slightly fascinated by. Looks like there is a book version of Cook & Tell which I wish I’d put on my Christmas list. But back to the cake. Sax describes Moravian Sugar Cake as “a deliciously moist yeast dough cake baked in a sheet pan and cut into large squares or rectangles”. In the book there’s a side note about happy accidents. It involves a cat and that’s all I’ll say. Lots of fun side notes in the Sax book.

Moravian Sugar Cake Pan Size

In Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax calls for a jellyroll or a 13×9 inch pan. Since we were keeping one cake and giving the other away, we divided the dough between two 8 inch square pans. We used two inexpensive metal pans and gave one of the cakes away right in the pan, so using 2 pans works well for holiday gifting. With 8 inch pans the cakes might be slightly thicker than some. We liked the thickness. Howver, if you only have one 8 inch pan and one 9 inch you could probably get away with using one of each.

Moravian Sugar Cake Ingredients

• Yeast – Richard Sax’s recipe calls for a pretty hefty amount of yeast — 4 1/2 teaspoons (2 packs) to only 3 cups (380 grams) of all-purpose flour. Not a typo. That is the amount used.
• Milk — Divided use. You use 1/4 cup to proof the yeast and add another 1/4 cup towards the end.
• Sugar — Again, divided use. You’ll put 1 tablespoon in with the yeast to power it up and the remaining sugar goes into the dough.
• Mashed Potato — You can use any kind of mashed potatoes including leftovers or reconstituted potato flakes. We peeled, cut and boiled one large potato then mashed it.
• All-Purpose Flour — We used all-purpose flour, and because our grocery store did not have any unbleached on the shelf, we used Gold Medal bleached.
• Eggs — Bring them to room temperature before using so that the dough will stay warm and rise.
• Butter — Lots of butter in this dough! We used unsalted.
• Salt — Morton kosher
• Topping Ingredients — Brown sugar, cinnamon and more butter for drizzing. For the brown sugar the recipe calls for light, but feel free to slip in some dark if you want more of a molasses flavor. For the butter drizzle, you can add a pinch of salt or use salted butter. We used unsalted butter in the dough, but salted butter for the drizzle for more flavor.

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Recipe