Fudge Cake
1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, Yolks 3 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 2 cups flour, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, Whites 3 eggs, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
Cream butter, add sugar gradually, while beating constantly, then add yolks of eggs well beaten. Mix and sift baking powder and flour, and add alternately with milk to the first mixture. Add whites of eggs beaten until stiff, chocolate melted over hot water, and vanilla.
Turn into two buttered and floured seven-inch square pans and bake in a moderate oven. Put between and on top Fudge Frosting. Melt over hot water two ounces of Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate. Add gradually one-third cup butter, bit by bit, and stir until butter is melted, then add gradually, while beating constantly, one cup milk. Bring to the boiling point and add two cups sugar and let boil until mixture will form a very soft ball when tried in cold water; the time required being about twenty minutes. Cool slightly, add one-half teaspoon flour and beat until of the right consistency to spread. One-fourth cup Jordan almonds, blanched and cut in pieces, may be added.
A fudge layer cake whose frosting is the real subject: not a buttercream but a genuine boiled fudge, cooked to a candy stage and spread while it is still workable. The cake itself is a plain creamed butter cake and will forgive you; the frosting will not.
- The hinge: the frosting is candy, not buttercreamIt is boiled fudge, so cook it to the soft-ball stage rather than trusting the twenty minutes given. The recipe asks for a "very soft ball", the lower end of that range (roughly 234-238F on a thermometer). Overcook it by a few degrees and it sets hard on the spatula; undercook it and it will run off the cake.
- "Premium No. 1 Chocolate"Walter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in half-pound cakes scored into eight one-ounce squares. Use 2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate in the cake and another 2 oz in the frosting.
- Moderate oven350F. Two buttered and floured 7-inch square pans of this batter need roughly 25 to 30 minutes.
- That half teaspoon of flourFlour beaten into a finished fudge frosting is unusual, and may be a printer's slip for vanilla, which the frosting otherwise lacks. If you follow it literally, the raw flour may be perceptible.
- Jordan almondsHere this means the large, flat Malaga-type almond sold for blanching rather than a sugar-shelled confection; the recipe's "blanched and cut in pieces" makes that plain. Use whole blanched almonds, slivered or shredded.
- YieldThe fudge cake gives a two-layer 7-inch square, about 9 generous servings, and the frosting quantity is ample for filling, top and sides.
Choice Recipes was a promotional booklet from Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate firm whose mills date to the 1760s and which traded hard on being the oldest in the country. Fudge itself was new enough at the time to be fashionable: it is generally traced to American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s, and by 1900 the word had jumped from the confection to the cakes and frostings made in its image. This is that second sense -- not a cake with fudge on it so much as a cake built to carry a cooked fudge, with the frosting given as much space in the printing as the batter. The heavy butter and the boiled frosting also reflect a period when unsweetened chocolate was what a home cook was most likely to keep, and sweetness had to be built in by the pound of sugar.