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Marshmallow Frosting
2 cups sugar, 7 tablespoons boiling water, 10 marshmallows, Whites 2 eggs. Put sugar and water in saucepan and stir to prevent sugar from adhering to saucepan. Heat to boiling point, and let boil rapidly, without stirring, until syrup will thread when dropped from tip of spoon. Remove from range and add marshmallows, cut in small pieces. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, but not dry, and add hot syrup gradually, while beating constantly; then continue the beating until mixture is of right consistency to spread. "SURE THING" CAKE 1 tablespoon butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, Yolk 1 egg, 1/2 cup Baker's Breakfast Cocoa, 1 cup sweet milk, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon soda, White 1 egg. Work the butter until creamy and add sugar gradually; then add yolk of egg, well beaten, and cocoa. Mix and sift flour, baking powder, and soda and add alternately with milk to first mixture. Beat thoroughly and add white of egg, beaten until stiff. Turn into a buttered and floured cake pan and bake in a moderate oven, forty-five minutes. Use pastry flour (once sifted) and measure baking powder and soda level.
Two recipes run together here: a boiled marshmallow frosting and the chocolate cake it was meant to cover. Both are straightforward, but the syrup stage and the cocoa need translating.
- The hinge: syrup temperature"Will thread when dropped from the tip of a spoon" is roughly 230-234F on a candy thermometer. Modern practice takes an Italian-meringue syrup to 238-240F, which sets the frosting more reliably and brings the egg whites nearer a safe temperature; if you would rather not push past thread stage, use pasteurized egg whites.
- Don't stir after it boilsThe instruction to stir only at the start, then leave it alone, is doing real work. A stray sugar crystal on the pan wall will seed the whole syrup and turn the frosting grainy. Wash the sides down with a wet pastry brush and cover the pan for the first minute or two.
- MarshmallowsThe marshmallows meant here are the plain gelatin-and-sugar confection, not the modern miniature. Ten modern large marshmallows are a reasonable stand-in; roughly a cup of miniatures is easier and melts faster in the hot syrup.
- Adding the syrupPour it in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl, not onto the beaters, or it will spin into hard threads against the sides. A stand mixer makes this a two-hand job rather than a three-hand one.
- Spread while warmThis frosting stiffens as it cools and will tear a cake surface once it sets. Get it on the cake while it still falls in soft ribbons; it firms to a marshmallow crust within an hour.
- Cocoa for the cakeBaker's Breakfast Cocoa was natural, unsweetened, non-alkalized cocoa. Use natural cocoa rather than Dutch-process here, since the recipe's teaspoon of soda relies on the cocoa's acidity for lift.
- "Sweet milk" and pastry flourSweet milk simply means fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured milk or buttermilk many recipes of the period called for. Pastry flour is lower in protein than all-purpose; substitute all-purpose measured a little short, or replace two tablespoons per cup with cornstarch.
- Oven and panA moderate oven is usually read as about 350-375F. Forty-five minutes suits a single deep 8- or 9-inch pan; start testing at 35 minutes, and expect 25-30 minutes if you split the batter between two layers.
- YieldThe frosting is generous, enough to fill and cover a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake, or to coat a single deep layer thickly. The cake serves 10 to 12.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was the oldest chocolate firm in the United States, and its little premium booklets of "Choice Recipes" were advertising as much as instruction, printed to move tins of Breakfast Cocoa and cakes of unsweetened chocolate into home kitchens. Several editions drew on recipes credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose insistence on level measurements shows plainly in the closing line here about measuring baking powder and soda level. The frosting itself belongs to the large family of boiled or "seven-minute" icings that dominated American cake decoration before butter-and-confectioners'-sugar frostings took over; commercial gelatin marshmallows, by then made with no remaining connection to the marsh mallow root they once came from, were simply melted in to give body and a softer set.