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Black Chocolate Cake (One and one-half cups of sugar)
One and one-half cups of sugar, half a cup of butter, one-half cup of sour milk or cream, two eggs, one-half teaspoon of soda dissolved in milk, one-half cake of chocolate dissolved in one-half cup of hot water, two cups of flour, two teaspoons of vanilla, one teaspoon of baking powder. Make three layers of the above. Filling-Boil one cup of granulated sugar with four tablespoons of water until it drops from spoon in threads. Have ready the beaten white of one egg, and pour the syrup into it, beating all the time. Flavor and spread on cake while warm.
— Mrs. William H. Hollenbeck
A three-layer sour-milk chocolate cake with a boiled-syrup icing. The chocolate quantity is the one genuinely ambiguous measure, and the icing is the part that rewards a thermometer.
- "One-half cake of chocolate"Baking chocolate then came as a solid block, and blocks of about half a pound scored into one-ounce squares were common, so half a cake may mean something near 4 oz — but sizes were not standard and the amount cannot be pinned down. Two to four ounces of unsweetened chocolate, melted in the half cup of hot water, all work; 3 oz gives a dark cake without dryness.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk, or half a cup of whole milk with 1 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The additional teaspoon of baking powder is not a mistake — the soda neutralises the acid, the powder supplies the rest of the lift.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given because the book assumes you know your range. Bake at 350F in three greased and floured 8-inch round pans, 18 to 22 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Thin layers overbake quickly.
- Method the recipe leaves outCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the melted chocolate mixture and the soured milk alternately with the flour, finishing with the vanilla. Mix only until the flour disappears.
- "Drops from spoon in threads"That is the thread stage, 230 to 235F on a candy thermometer. Below it the icing stays syrupy and soaks into the cake; much above it the icing sets hard and cracks while you spread it.
- The icing itselfThis is a boiled-syrup meringue. Pour the hot syrup in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl into the egg white while beating, and keep beating until the mixture holds a soft peak. Spread while still warm, as instructed — it stiffens fast and will tear the crumb once cool.
- One egg white is scantA single white with one cup of sugar makes a modest amount of icing, likely enough to fill between the layers and thinly top them but not to cover the sides. Double the icing if you want the sides covered.
- YieldOne 8-inch three-layer cake, 10 to 12 servings.
"Black chocolate cake" was a familiar late-nineteenth-century name for a cake made dark with unsweetened chocolate rather than merely flavoured with it — a distinction worth making at a time when many so-called chocolate cakes were white or yellow layers spread with chocolate icing. Cakes of this type, leaning on sour milk and soda, with the alkali giving the crumb a reddish cast, belong to the family from which the devil's food cakes of the early twentieth century emerged. Boiled-syrup white icing was widely used in this period, since it needed only sugar, water and an egg white; confectioners' sugar frostings later took over much of its place. The attribution to Mrs. William H. Hollenbeck is typical of the "Village Receipts" section: these compiled community cookbooks were fundraisers, and the contributor's name was part of the appeal — you were buying your neighbours' best cake.