Home › Cakes › Devils Food Cake
Devils Food Cake
1 1/2 cupfuls sugar 1 1/2 cupfuls milk 1/2 cake chocolate 2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 2 eggs 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking soda 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Boiled frosting 1/2 teaspoonful salt Put 1/2 cupful of sugar into small saucepan, add chocolate and 1 cupful milk. Put on stove and stir till it boils five minutes, stirring now and then. Remove from fire, add vanilla and set aside to cool. Beat Crisco and remainder of sugar to light cream, then add eggs well beaten and beat two minutes. Now add remainder of milk, soda dissolved in boiling water, flour, salt, and chocolate mixture. Mix carefully and divide into two large greased and floured layer tins and bake in moderate oven twenty five minutes. Turn to cool and put together with boiled frosting.
Sufficient for two large layers.
A layer cake from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks, built on a cooked chocolate-and-milk base rather than melted chocolate stirred straight in. A few of its measures need translating before you start.
- "1/2 cake chocolate"Baking chocolate was commonly sold in half-pound cakes scored into one-ounce squares, so half a cake is usually read as about 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate. Use unsweetened rather than semisweet: sweetened chocolate would throw off the sugar balance and carries less of the acidic cocoa solid the soda works on.
- The cooked base is the hingeThe cooked base -- Simmering the chocolate with 1/2 cup sugar and 1 cup milk for five minutes thickens it into a loose pudding. Let it cool as directed before it goes into the batter; adding it hot risks softening the creamed fat and setting the egg.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated since its introduction and now labelled 0g trans fat per serving. Half a cup of any solid vegetable shortening works; unsalted butter can be substituted, though it brings water with it and will change the flavour and texture.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes should suit two shallow layer tins; start testing at twenty.
- Soda in boiling waterDissolving the teaspoon of soda in three tablespoons of boiling water disperses it evenly, which matters when it is the only leavening. Once it goes in, mix and pan the batter promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Pans"Two large layer tins" is unspecified; 8- or 9-inch rounds both suit the quantity. Grease and flour as directed, or line the bottoms with parchment.
- Boiled frostingThe period name for icing made by beating hot sugar syrup into whipped egg whites, a close relative of seven-minute frosting. It sets with a soft skin and does not keep, so frost the cake the day it is served.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, as the recipe states.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; the book calls for the shortening throughout, which is why butter is absent from a cake that would otherwise likely have used it. Devil's food appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, its name usually read as the dark counterpart to the pale, fat-free angel food cake. The reddish cast that old recipes sometimes mention is generally attributed to alkaline baking soda reacting with the acidic natural cocoa solids in unsweetened chocolate, the same chemistry later associated with red velvet cake. Cooking the chocolate with milk and sugar first, rather than simply melting it, turns up in other recipes of the period.