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Miss Farmer's Chocolate Nougat Cake
1/4 cup of butter, 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup of milk, 2 cups of bread flour, 3 teaspoonfuls of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoonful of vanilla, 2 squares of chocolate, melted, 1/3 cup of powdered sugar, 2/3 cup of almonds blanched and shredded.
Cream the butter, add gradually one and one-half cups of sugar, and egg unbeaten; when well mixed, add two-thirds milk, flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and vanilla. To melted chocolate add one-third a cup of powdered sugar, place on range, add gradually remaining milk, and cook until smooth. Cool slightly and add to cake mixture. Bake fifteen to twenty minutes in round layer-cake pans. Put between layers and on top of cake frosting sprinkled with almonds.--From Boston Cooking School Cook Book--Fannie Merritt Farmer.
A layer cake in which the chocolate is not simply melted in but cooked first with sugar and milk into a smooth paste. That paste is what the recipe means by nougat, and it is the step that separates this from an ordinary chocolate layer cake.
- Read the ingredient list twice: the sugar is in it twiceA cup and a half of powdered sugar goes into the batter, and a further third of a cup is cooked with the chocolate. They do different jobs and are not interchangeable. Measure them separately before you start.
- The milk is split as wellTwo-thirds of the cup goes into the batter with the flour; the remaining third goes into the chocolate paste on the range. The recipe never says "one-third", only "remaining milk", which is easy to miss.
- The cooked chocolate paste is the pointMelted chocolate, a third of a cup of sugar and the reserved milk are cooked together until smooth, cooled slightly, and only then stirred into the batter. Skipping this and folding in plain melted chocolate gives a drier, duller crumb -- the paste is what keeps this cake moist.
- "Egg unbeaten"One whole egg, straight in after the sugar, with no beating first. Three teaspoonfuls of baking powder are doing all the lifting, so there is no need to build air into the egg.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" is a fine granulated sugar, not today's cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar. Ordinary granulated works throughout the nougat cake.
- Bread flourBread flour is the default flour throughout Farmer's book. All-purpose gives a better crumb now; keep the mixing brief once the flour goes in.
- The frosting our printing leaves unnamedThis text says only to put "frosting" between the layers and on top. The 1912 printing named it: White Mountain Cream, the boiled white frosting from Farmer's own book -- a hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg white. Any boiled or seven-minute white frosting gives the intended contrast against the dark crumb.
- Oven and pansRound layer-cake tins at 350F for the fifteen to twenty minutes given. The layers are thin, so start testing at twelve.
Fannie Merritt Farmer was principal of the Boston Cooking School, and The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 -- the book this recipe is credited to -- did more than any other single volume to put level measurements into American kitchens. She is still called the mother of level measurement for it. That insistence is visible in the recipe: everything is given as a stated fraction of a cup, at a time when a great many printed recipes still said a piece of butter the size of an egg. "Nougat" here has drifted a long way from the almond-and-honey confection; in American cake naming of the period it signalled a cooked, fudge-like chocolate mixture worked into a batter, and the shredded almonds over the top are what is left of the original sense.