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Delicious Chocolate Cake
The whites of eight eggs, two cups sugar, one of butter, three full cups flour, one of sweet milk, three tea-spoons baking-powder; beat the butter to a cream, stir in the sugar, and beat until light; add the milk, then the flour and beaten whites. When well beaten, divide into equal parts, and into half grate a cake of sweet chocolate. Bake in layers, spread with custard, and alternate the white and dark cakes. For custard for the cake, add a table-spoon of butter to one pint of milk, and let it come to a boil; stir in two eggs beaten with one cup of sugar, add two teaspoons of corn starch dissolved in a little milk. -Mrs. J. M. Riddle, Bellefontaine.
A four-layer white cake in which half the batter is darkened with grated chocolate, stacked alternately with a boiled cornstarch custard. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own layer pans, so a few numbers are worth pinning down.
- The chocolate is not measured"a cake of sweet chocolate" meant a moulded tablet of eating chocolate, and these varied by maker, so no exact weight can be recovered. Two ounces of grated sweet or semisweet chocolate gives a clear contrast without weighing down half the batter; more than that and the dark layers turn heavy, since no liquid is added to compensate.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction; 350F for about 20 to 25 minutes in 8- or 9-inch pans works for layers this thin. The dark layers colour deceptively, so test with a skewer rather than by eye.
- Egg whitesEight whites is roughly one cup. Beat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons in three cups of flour is standard by modern reckoning, but nineteenth-century baking powders were weaker and less uniform. Sift the powder through the flour rather than dumping it in with the milk.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk. It is specified because sour milk with saleratus was the other common option, and the two are not interchangeable here.
- The custard is the hingeTemper the beaten eggs and sugar with a little of the hot milk before they go into the pan, and cook over low heat, stirring, until the cornstarch has thickened and lost its raw taste, two to three minutes at a bare simmer. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and the filling will slump between layers.
- Cool everythingChill the custard until thick and spread it on fully cold layers. Warm cake plus warm custard produces a cake that slides apart. It sets soft, not firm, so this is a cake to serve the day it is filled and to keep refrigerated.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many layers; dividing the batter in two and baking two pans of each gives four thin layers, enough for about twelve. If you bake in batches, weigh the batter to keep the white and dark halves even.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) came together from contributions by named women across the state, and this one carries Mrs. J. M. Riddle of Bellefontaine with it. That chocolate appears here as "a cake of sweet chocolate" to be grated, rather than as cocoa powder by the spoonful, suits the period: eating chocolate came pressed into hard tablets that a cook shaved down herself, and powdered cocoa was less commonly reached for in American home recipes of this date. The trick of dividing one white batter and darkening half of it was a thrifty way to get a striking two-tone layer cake out of a single mixing. The eight whites also hint at the wider household economy of such books, where the yolks would be wanted the same afternoon for a custard or a sauce -- though not for this filling, which calls for two whole eggs.