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Fudge Pudding
Follow the recipe for Everyday Cake, baking it in muffin pans. Serve cold with Fudge Sauce, with or without a garnish of whipped cream.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it depends on two other pages in the book, the Everyday Cake and the Fudge Sauce. The one thing it changes is the pan, and that changes the baking time more than anything else.
- Reduce the baking timeA batter meant for layers or a loaf will bake much faster in muffin cups. No temperature or time is given for this version, so judge by a clean tester and a springy top rather than by the time given for the parent recipe, which will overbake these.
- Fill the cups two-thirdsThe recipe says nothing about preparing the pans. Grease and flour them, or use paper liners, and fill each cup about two-thirds full so the cakes dome rather than spill.
- YieldDepending on the size of the parent batter, a one-layer quantity should give roughly a dozen standard muffin-sized puddings.
- SnowdriftSnowdrift was a brand of cottonseed-oil shortening; it belongs to the parent cake recipe rather than to this page. Modern vegetable shortening substitutes cup for cup; butter works too but gives a firmer, drier crumb once the cakes are cold, which matters here since they are served cold.
- Serve cold, sauce hotThe recipe asks only that the cakes be served cold; warming the sauce is an optional choice, not stated here. Fudge sauce thickens and sets on standing, so sauce made ahead will need thinning with a spoonful of milk or cream when reheated.
- KeepingThe cakes are best the day they are baked and go stale quickly without frosting to seal them. Store them airtight, and hold the sauce separately in the refrigerator.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book is a branded cookbook meant to show that the product could do what lard and butter did. That commercial logic helps explain the recipe's shape: rather than a new formula, it recycles the Everyday Cake into a second dish, a common device in promotional cookbooks. Fudge had spread through American women's colleges in the 1890s and was thoroughly domestic by the time this book appeared; pouring the sauce over plain cake to make a "pudding" reflects the loose American use of that word for almost any sweet course.