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Gateau De Chocolat
Make a gateau, as in the last recipe but one (see GATEAU A LA DAUPHINE). When it is sufficiently baked, turn it out of the tin, and let it cool. Put half a pound of sugar into a saucepan, with a quarter of a pint of water. Dip the finger and thumb into cold water, and keep taking a little of the boiling sugar between them. When it looks like strong glue it should be taken from the fire, allowed to stand eight or ten minutes, and then be mixed with three ounces of chocolate, dissolved in a little water. Work all well together, and while the mixture is still hot, glaze the gateau with it, and ornament with spun sugar. Time, forty minutes to bake the cake. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for a moderate-sized gateau.
This is a glaze recipe rather than a cake recipe: the cake itself is borrowed from an earlier entry, and everything here hangs on how far the sugar syrup is boiled. Read the sugar stage first, because once it is past it there is no recovery.
- The hinge: the sugar stage"Looks like strong glue" is the old finger-and-thumb test for a syrup around the thread to soft-ball range, roughly 230-240F. Use a thermometer rather than dipping fingers into boiling sugar, and take the pan off the heat the moment it reaches temperature.
- Why it rests eight or ten minutesThe recipe gives no reason, but the pause would let the syrup drop below the point where it could scorch or seize the chocolate. Added too hot the glaze may turn grainy; too cool and it stiffens in the pan before it reaches the cake.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint is 5 imperial fluid ounces, about 2/3 cup less a tablespoon in US measure. Half a pound of sugar is a generous cup; three ounces of chocolate is three squares of a standard baking block.
- The chocolateVictorian recipe "chocolate" means a cake or block of chocolate, sold for drinking as much as for baking; such blocks ranged from plain to distinctly sweetened. Unsweetened baking chocolate is the safer modern substitute here, since the syrup supplies all the sugar and a sweet eating bar risks a cloying glaze.
- Dissolving in waterMelting chocolate with a little water rather than fat is deliberate here and gives a glossy, slightly brittle coat closer to a fondant than a ganache. Keep the water to a couple of tablespoons and stir over gentle heat only.
- The cake and the ovenNo oven heat is given here; the baking belongs to the earlier gateau recipe this entry refers back to, and the only guide on this page is the forty minutes. Check with a skewer at 35 minutes, and let the cake cool completely before glazing or the coating will slide.
- Working quicklyThe glaze is poured hot and does not tolerate reheating well. Set the cooled cake on a rack over a tray, pour from the centre outward, and spread with one or two passes of a warm palette knife.
- Spun sugarSpun sugar needs a separate, drier boil, to about 310F, then flicked in threads from a fork over an oiled rod. It collapses within a few hours in humid air, so spin it just before serving or leave it off.
- Yield"A moderate-sized gateau" is not defined; something in the region of an 8-inch cake would suit, and the glaze quantity is ample for the top and sides of a cake that size.
"Gateau" in a late-Victorian English cookery book is a claim to French polish: Cassell's, like many household dictionaries of its period, borrowed the vocabulary and much of the technique of the Paris pastry kitchen for a middle-class readership that would never employ a French chef. The recipe belongs to the moment when chocolate stopped being chiefly a drink and became a confectioner's material in British homes, following the nineteenth-century development of presses that separated cocoa butter from the mass and made cheap, reliable eating and baking blocks widely available. The costing in shillings and pence, given for the recipes in the book, is the real period detail here: at 1s 8d this was probably a treat rather than an everyday cake, and the spun-sugar finish suggests a dish meant for a dinner table with guests at it.