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Spanish Chocolate Cake
One cup of sugar, one-half a cup of butter, one-half a cup of sweet milk, three cups of flour, two eggs, one teaspoonful of soda dissolved in hot water. Put on the stove one cup of milk, one-half a cup of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, grated; stir until dissolved; then stir into it one cup of sugar and the yolk of one egg stirred together; when cool flavor with vanilla. While this is cooling beat up the first part of the cake and add the chocolate custard. Bake in layers. Ice on top and between the layers.
A two-part layer cake: a plain butter batter, plus a cooked chocolate custard folded in at the end. The custard is the hinge, and it must be cool before it meets the creamed butter.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in hard cakes meant to be grated. Half a cup grated is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 oz; use unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped fine or coarsely grated, and not cocoa powder, which lacks the cocoa butter the batter is counting on.
- Sweet milkMeans fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that older recipes often call for. Nothing sour is wanted here.
- The soda has little to work onWith sweet milk and no molasses or cream of tartar, the teaspoon of soda has little acid to react with beyond whatever is in the chocolate. The crumb may well come out closer and heavier than a modern cake's; that would be a feature of the formula rather than an error in the transcription.
- Cool the custard properlyStir the milk, chocolate, sugar and yolk over low heat until it thickens slightly and coats the spoon, then let it come down to room temperature. Added warm, it will melt the butter out of the creamed base and the batter will separate.
- Order of mixingThe plain part is thick with three cups of flour against half a cup of milk; it will look dry until the custard goes in and loosens it to a heavy pouring batter.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no oven heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent; the batter should fill roughly three 8-inch layers or two 9-inch, with perhaps 20 to 25 minutes for the shallower pans.
- IcingNo icing recipe is given. A plain boiled white icing or a simple confectioners' sugar and milk glaze would suit.
- YieldProbably serves ten to twelve.
Walter Baker & Company of Dorchester, Massachusetts, issued recipe booklets as advertising, and recipes of this sort name a Baker product outright -- here Premium No. 1, the firm's plain unsweetened chocolate. Why the cake is called "Spanish" is not clear; the word was attached loosely to chocolate cookery in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, perhaps in reference to Spain's part in bringing chocolate from Mesoamerica into Europe, but that is tradition rather than documented derivation. What the recipe does show is chocolate still being sold in solid cakes to be grated and dissolved in hot milk, the drinking method, with that step adapted here into a custard folded into cake batter.