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Caramel Cake (One and a half cups sugar)
One and a half cups sugar, three-fourths cup butter, half cup milk, two and a fourth cups flour, three eggs, one and a half heaping tea-spoons baking-powder, or a small tea-spoon soda, and two tea-spoons cream tartar; bake in jelly-tins. Make caramel as follows: Butter size of an egg, pint brown sugar, half cup milk or water, half cake chocolate; boil twenty minutes (or until thick enough), and pour over cakes while warm, piling the layers one upon the other. For frosting for top of cake, take whites of two eggs, one and a half cups sugar, tea-spoon vanilla, three heaping teaspoons grated chocolate. - Mrs. Ella Snider, Minneapolis, Minn.
A three-layer butter cake with a boiled brown-sugar-and-chocolate filling. The filling is the part that decides whether the cake works, so read it first.
- The filling is candy, not frostingButter, brown sugar, milk and chocolate boiled for twenty minutes will reach at least the soft-ball stage and can go beyond it; the recipe's own "or until thick enough" is the better guide. It must be poured while still fluid and hot, since it sets firm as it cools and cannot then be spread. Work fast and stack the layers as you go.
- "Half cake chocolate"This means unsweetened block baking chocolate, sold in cakes of no standard weight, so the intended quantity is genuinely ambiguous; estimates from about 1 oz up to 4 oz are all defensible. Modern semisweet or chips will make the filling sweeter than intended.
- A pint of brown sugarMeasured by volume, that is 2 cups, about 14 oz packed. Period brown sugar was less refined and moister than today's light brown; light brown sugar is the closer match.
- Soda and cream of tartarThe alternative leavening given is simply homemade baking powder: 1 small teaspoon soda plus 2 teaspoons cream of tartar. Use one system or the other, not both, and mix the dry acid and soda into the flour so they do not fire off in the bowl.
- Jelly-tins and oven heatJelly-tins are shallow round layer pans, commonly 8 or 9 inches. The book gives no temperature; a moderate modern oven, around 350F for 18 to 22 minutes, suits these layers, which are thin in the pan and overbake quickly.
- The top frosting is uncookedTwo raw whites beaten with 1 1/2 cups sugar, vanilla and grated chocolate gives a stiff uncooked icing. It sets soft and weeps in humidity, and because the whites are never heated, use pasteurized whites if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Butter and saltThree-fourths cup butter to 2 1/4 cups flour is a rich, tender crumb. The recipe calls for no salt, and butter of the period was usually salted; with unsalted butter add 1/2 teaspoon salt to the flour or the cake tastes flat under all that sugar.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many layers to make; this quantity of batter will fill two or three 8-inch tins, serving roughly 8 to 12. It cuts best after several hours, once the boiled filling has firmed enough to hold the stack together.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was issued from Minneapolis, which is why Minneapolis contributors appear in it; the layer-cake chapter reads as a roll call of names and towns. (The Marysville, Ohio compilation was the earlier 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book.) "Caramel" here does not mean burnt sugar in the French sense but the American one: any filling or icing made by boiling sugar with butter and milk to the soft-ball stage. That the caramel also contains chocolate is characteristic of the 1870s, when block baking chocolate was an ordinary grocery item and cooks added it to sugar syrups as a flavoring. The doubled instruction for leavening, baking powder or soda with cream of tartar, marks the period exactly: commercial baking powder was still new enough that a cook might not have it on the shelf.