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Chocolate Gingerbread
1 cup molasses, 1/2 cup sour milk, 1 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon cold water, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 1 teaspoon ginger, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 cups flour, 2 ounces melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Mix molasses and sour milk, and add two tablespoons butter and soda dissolved in cold water; then add flour mixed and sifted with spices and salt. Add chocolate and remaining butter. Pour into three buttered round layer cake tins (Washington Pie pans) and bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. Remove from pans, cool, and cover with vanilla or chocolate icing.
A soft molasses gingerbread baked as thin layers rather than a loaf, then iced like a cake. Two points decide whether it works: the chocolate is unsweetened, and the batter is thin.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateThis was Walter Baker's plain unsweetened baking chocolate, not a sweet eating bar. Substitute 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted and slightly cooled; using semisweet or Dutch cocoa will change both the sweetness and the acid balance the soda depends on.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was naturally clabbered whole milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use 1/2 cup buttermilk, or 1/2 cup whole milk with 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F; period 'moderate' covered a range. Thin layers of dark molasses batter scorch quickly, so check before the stated twenty minutes are up.
- Washington pie pansStraight-sided round layer tins, 8 to 9 inches across and shallow. Three modern 8-inch cake pans work; butter them and line the bottoms with parchment, as molasses batter sticks stubbornly.
- No sugar at allThe molasses is the only sweetener, which is why the layers are meant to be iced. Unsulphured molasses gives a cleaner flavor than blackstrap, which will read as bitter against unsweetened chocolate.
- The split butterTwo tablespoons go in with the molasses, the third at the end with the chocolate. The recipe gives no reason for the split; the extra fat added alongside the chocolate may simply help it blend smoothly into a cool batter.
- Batter consistencyWith 2 cups flour to 1 1/2 cups liquid this pours rather than spreads. Do not add flour to thicken it; sift the flour with the spices and salt as directed, and beat only until smooth.
- YieldThree thin layers, stacked and iced, serving eight to ten.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts traced its chocolate mills back to 1780 and by the turn of the twentieth century was issuing small promotional recipe books like this one, several compiled with the help of well-known Boston cooking-school teachers. The point of such booklets was to move chocolate out of the beverage cup and into everything else a housekeeper baked, which is how a thoroughly New England molasses gingerbread ends up with two ounces of unsweetened chocolate stirred through it. The "Washington Pie pans" named in the method are a period giveaway: Washington pie was a plain New England layer cake split and filled with jam, and its shallow round tins were standard equipment, so the recipe assumes the reader will treat gingerbread as a frosted layer cake rather than a loaf. Sour milk leavened with soda was the ordinary baking chemistry of the day, a legacy of kitchens that kept milk until it clabbered on its own.