Home › Cake-Making › Chocolate Cake (One cup butter three of brown)
Chocolate Cake (One cup butter three of brown)
One cup butter, three of brown sugar, one of sweet milk, four of flour, yolks of seven eggs, nine table-spoons grated Baker's chocolate, three tea-spoons baking powder. This may be baked as a layer cake, making a white cake of the whites of the eggs, baking in layers, and putting them together with frosting, alternating the layers. Mrs. Frank Woods Robinson, Kenton.
A yolks-only chocolate butter cake from a contributor in Kenton, Ohio, with a suggestion for pairing it with a white cake made from the leftover whites. No oven temperature, pan size or baking time is given, as was normal in 1877.
- Baker's chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold then as a hard pressed cake meant to be grated. Nine tablespoons grated is roughly 2 to 3 ounces depending on how finely it is grated -- two or three one-ounce squares of a modern bar; melting it with a little of the milk gives a smoother batter than grating.
- Sweet milkFresh unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that partnered saleratus in older recipes. Since the leavening here is baking powder, no acid is wanted.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it: layers of this batter run 22 to 30 minutes depending on thickness; a loaf or tube cake will want an hour or more, tested with a skewer in the center.
- Scale and pansA cup of butter, three cups of sugar and four of flour is a very large cake by modern standards -- something like 9 cups of batter. Three 9-inch rounds, or two 9x13 pans, or halve the whole thing for an ordinary layer cake.
- Brown sugarNineteenth-century brown sugar was moister and less uniform than today's. Light brown sugar, firmly packed, is the closest match; dark brown will push the cake toward molasses and fight the chocolate.
- MixingNo method is given. The standard creaming method fits: cream the butter and sugar thoroughly, beat in the yolks, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Fold in the melted chocolate last, and stop as soon as the batter is uniform.
- The white cakeSeven whites will carry about 2 cups flour, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup milk and 2 teaspoons baking powder if you want to follow the alternating-layer suggestion. Bake both in the same size pans so the stack sits level.
- FrostingThe recipe calls only for frosting between the layers and does not say what kind; a boiled or plain confectioners' frosting would be usual for the period. Any firm buttercream works; a thin frosting will let a cake this heavy slide.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from recipes signed by named contributors in named towns -- here Kenton, in northwestern Ohio -- which is why the book reads as a snapshot of what real Midwestern households were baking rather than what a single author thought they should. Chocolate as a cake flavoring was still comparatively new in American home baking; for most of the century chocolate was something you drank, and the shift to baking depended on cheap, reliably ground unsweetened cake chocolate, of which Baker's of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the brand common enough to be used as a generic name in recipes. The instruction to bake a companion white cake from the leftover whites belongs to the same thrift that produced the era's gold-and-silver cakes: an egg separated for one purpose left half an egg needing a use, and a good cookbook told you what it was.