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Chocolate Glace Cake
1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/2 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add chocolate melted and unbeaten eggs. Beat vigorously five minutes, then add milk and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and vanilla. Turn into a buttered and floured shallow cake pan and bake in a moderate oven thirty-five minutes. Remove from pan and spread with
A plain butter cake carrying one ounce of unsweetened chocolate, finished with a poured glacé icing. Note that the original text breaks off mid-sentence at the icing — the page as printed gives no frosting recipe.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as roughly 350F. Thirty-five minutes suits a single shallow layer; test at 30 minutes with a skewer.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened baking chocolate, so one ounce of any modern unsweetened bar is a direct substitute. Do not use semisweet or cocoa powder — the sugar and fat balance is built around unsweetened.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is high by current practice; period powders were generally single-acting. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder is closer to current proportions.
- Shallow cake panAn 8-inch square or round pan about 1 1/2 inches deep. This is a single thin layer meant to be glazed on top, not split and filled.
- The five minutes of beatingThe eggs go in unbeaten, so much of the aeration depends on this step alongside the creaming and the baking powder. With a stand mixer, five minutes on medium-high is not excessive — the batter should lighten visibly.
- Mixing orderMilk and the sifted dry ingredients go in together at the end. Fold or beat on low only until combined; the long beating was already done.
- The missing icingPeriod glace or confectioners' icings were commonly powdered sugar moistened with a little hot water or milk and flavouring, thin enough to pour. The page breaks off before this one is given, so the exact intended icing is unknown.
- YieldOne thin 8-inch layer, cut into 9 squares or 8 wedges.
The Choice Recipes booklets were promotional literature from Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and several editions drew on recipes credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer and other Boston Cooking School figures — which may be why the method here reads like a cooking-school lesson, with its insistence on creaming, gradual addition and timed beating. "Glace" means glazed or iced: the cake is finished with a poured sugar coating rather than a boiled or buttercream frosting, though the page breaks off before the icing itself is described.