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Chocolate Cakes
Cream together four ounces of butter and six ounces of sugar; sift six ounces of flour and half a tea-spoonful of baking powder together; add five beaten eggs to the butter and sugar, and stir in six ounces of vanilla-flavoured chocolate with the flour and baking-powder. Have ready some patty-pans, half fill with the mixture, and bake from ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A straightforward creamed small-cake batter, written for cooks who owned scales and knew their oven by feel. Two things need pinning down: the chocolate and the tin.
- The chocolate"Vanilla-flavoured chocolate" meant a sweetened eating or drinking block flavoured with vanilla, not unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 6 oz of a sweet or semi-sweet bar, grated fine or melted and cooled before it goes in; unsweetened chocolate here will make the cakes harsh and dry, since the sugar is already fixed at 6 oz.
- Weights, not cups4 oz butter is 1 stick (115 g), 6 oz sugar is a scant cup, 6 oz flour about 1 1/3 cups. The recipe is balanced by weight and is worth scaling that way.
- Five eggs is a lot of liquidEggs of the period were likely smaller than a modern large egg. Four large eggs (about 200 g out of shell) may be closer to the intent; five will loosen the batter considerably, especially with melted chocolate added.
- Order of workAdd the beaten eggs to the creamed butter and sugar a little at a time, and if it looks like curdling take a spoonful of the sifted flour into it. Then fold in the rest of the flour, baking powder and chocolate together, as written.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet or bun tins, smaller and flatter than a modern muffin cup. Standard 12-cup bun tins work; grease them or use paper cases, and half fill as directed rather than filling to the brim.
- OvenNo temperature is given. For small cakes baked in ten to fifteen minutes, a modern oven at about 375F/190C is a reasonable starting point. They are done when the tops spring back and a skewer comes out with no wet batter.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 small cakes, depending on the tin.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is the retail price of the ingredients in late Victorian money, printed so a housekeeper could check the household books. It is a period detail, not a modern guide.
Cassell's ran cost figures beside its recipes because the book was aimed at households managing a budget and, often, a cook who had to account for what she spent. Chocolate as a baking ingredient was still comparatively new in this form: through most of the nineteenth century chocolate was chiefly a drink, and it was the pressing out of cocoa butter earlier in the century, and then the blending of it back into sweetened eating blocks from around mid-century, that put a solid, sliceable, vanilla-scented bar within reach of an ordinary kitchen. The instruction to use "vanilla-flavoured chocolate" reflects that: vanilla was a common flavouring added to sweet chocolate by the makers, so a cook could buy it already scented rather than adding extract herself. Baking powder is another marker of date - chemical raising agents were widely available by the time this dictionary appeared, though the five eggs here suggest the older reliance on beaten eggs had not gone.