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For Filling (Teaspoonful Crisco ounce)
1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 ounce chocolate 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/2 cupful hot water 1/2 cupful brown sugar 1/2 cupful granulated sugar Pinch salt For cake. Put granulated sugar into small pan and melt over fire till brown, remove from fire, add boiling water, stir quickly, return to stove, and stir until thick syrup; set aside to cool. Beat Crisco and sugar to a cream, add eggs well beaten, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, three tablespoonfuls of the syrup and water. Mix and beat two minutes, then divide into two Criscoed and floured layer tins and bake in moderate oven twenty minutes. For filling. Melt granulated sugar in small pan and stir until it becomes a light brown syrup, add the water gradually, then brown sugar, Crisco, salt, and chocolate, stirring all the time. Cook until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240 Degree F. Remove from fire, add vanilla, beat until creamy, then spread between cakes.
Sufficient for one layer cake.
This entry prints the filling ingredients only, then gives directions for both the cake and the filling. Anyone working from this page alone will need a layer-cake recipe to go with it; the filling itself is a caramel-chocolate fudge frosting and stands perfectly well on its own.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe quantities given cover the filling. The cake method calls for Crisco, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, syrup and water, none of which are quantified on this page. Use a standard two-layer butter cake and reserve three tablespoons of the caramel syrup for it, as the method directs.
- CriscoHydrogenated all-vegetable shortening, the product this book was written to promote. Modern Crisco is reformulated and is labelled as having no trans fat per serving. Butter can be substituted one for one in a filling this small.
- "Criscoed and floured"Simply greased and floured. Two round layer tins; 8-inch or 9-inch will serve.
- Moderate oven350°F. Twenty minutes is right for thin layers in 8- or 9-inch tins; test at eighteen.
- One ounce chocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate, not semi-sweet. A single square of the old one-ounce blocks. With two half-cups of sugar in the filling, sweetened chocolate would tip it over.
- The hinge: dry caramelMelting granulated sugar alone in a pan scorches fast and unevenly. Use a heavy pan, moderate heat, and stir only once it starts to liquefy. Adding boiling water to hot caramel spits violently — stand back and pour it in at arm's length.
- 240°FThe original gives both the cold-water soft-ball test and the temperature. Follow the thermometer; cooked much beyond soft-ball the filling sets hard and breaks when the cake is cut.
- Beating and spreadingLet the syrup cool somewhat before beating, then beat until it loses its gloss and thickens. Spread promptly; fudge fillings of this kind stiffen quickly in the bowl, and can be warmed briefly over hot water if they seize.
- YieldEnough to fill one two-layer cake, roughly a cup. It will not stretch to covering the top and sides as well.
This comes from one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing Crisco in 1911, the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The books were reportedly free or near-free, and are often described as arranged as menus and calendars so a housekeeper would encounter the product in every course of every day, and the verb "to Crisco" a cake tin appears throughout as though it had always been English. The filling itself is older than the shortening: a caramel made by melting sugar dry, slaked with boiling water and cooked to the soft-ball stage, was a familiar American cake filling in the late nineteenth century, and the chocolate here is a late addition to a technique confectioners had used for generations. The double appearance of the burnt-sugar syrup — three spoonfuls into the batter, the rest into the filling — is the mark of a well-built recipe rather than an advertisement.