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Chocolate Caramel Cake Part I
1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup water, 1 1/2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Put sugar in a smooth granite ware saucepan or omelet pan, place on hot part of range and stir constantly until melted and of the color of maple syrup. Care must be taken to prevent sugar from adhering to sides of pan or spoon. Add water very gradually to hot syrup; then add chocolate, melted. Let boil two minutes and cool slightly.
PART II 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 eggs, Part I, 3/4 cup water, 2 1/2 cups flour, 5 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon vanilla. Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add eggs well beaten and Part I. Mix and sift flour and baking powder and add alternately with water to first mixture. Beat vigorously and add flavoring. Turn into a buttered and floured cake tin and bake in a moderate oven forty-five minutes. Remove from pan and cover with
A two-stage cake: burnt-sugar caramel syrup made first, then folded into a plain butter cake batter. The caramel is where the flavor and the difficulty both live.
- The hinge: adding water to hot caramelThe melted sugar is well above 300F and will spit violently when liquid hits it. Add the water a spoonful at a time with the pan pulled off the heat and your hand clear, then return it to the burner to dissolve any hardened lumps. Some cooks warm the water first, which reduces the reaction.
- Dry caramel techniqueSugar melted alone scorches quickly at the edges. Use a heavy pan over medium heat rather than the "hot part of the range," and stop the moment it reaches maple-syrup color — a few seconds further and it turns acrid.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened baking chocolate in 1-ounce squares, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz unsweetened chocolate. Any modern unsweetened bar works; do not substitute semisweet, which will throw off both sugar and fat.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to 2 1/2 cups flour is roughly double what current double-acting baking powder requires. Period powders were generally single-acting and are usually assumed to have been less powerful. About 2 1/2 teaspoons is the modern equivalent; the full amount is likely to give a coarse crumb and a soapy aftertaste.
- OvenA "moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350F (period guidance runs roughly 350-375F). Forty-five minutes suits a single deep tin; two 9-inch layers should be done in about 25 to 30.
- PanThe batter is large — roughly 5 cups. A 9x13 tin, a 10-inch tube pan, or two 9-inch rounds all work. "Buttered and floured" is still the right preparation for a caramel cake, which sticks.
- Granite wareGranite ware is enameled steel. A light-colored stainless or enameled pan does the same job; avoid dark nonstick, where you cannot see the color change.
- The missing endingThe text breaks off at "cover with" — the covering is not specified on this page. Any cooked caramel or chocolate icing finishes it; the cake itself is complete as written.
- YieldTwelve to sixteen servings from a 9x13, or one two-layer cake.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts published to promote its chocolate — a genre of corporate cookbook that flourished around 1900, when, it is often said, Boston Cooking School methods were being packaged for home cooks by ingredient manufacturers. The naming is worth noting: "caramel cake" here means a cake flavored with burnt sugar, not one iced with caramel frosting, and the technique of scorching sugar and dissolving it into a dark syrup was a standard nineteenth-century way to get color and a slight bitterness into baked goods before commercial browning extracts were widespread. Combining that burnt-sugar syrup with unsweetened chocolate doubles down on the bitter edge, which the 1 1/2 cups of sugar in Part II then balances. Baker's, founded in 1780, was the oldest chocolate company in the United States, and booklets like this one were as much advertising as instruction.