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Wellesley Loaf Cake
1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, Yolks 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/4 cups flour, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, Whites 2 eggs, 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick, milk, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Add whites of eggs, beaten until stiff, chocolate (melted over hot water) and vanilla. Turn into a buttered and floured shallow cake pan, and bake in a moderate oven from thirty-five to forty minutes. Remove from pan, cover top with Wellesley frosting and when frosting is set pour over, a little at a time, two squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate (which has been melted over hot water) and spread evenly, using the back of a spoon.
A small chocolate layer, frosted white and then flooded with melted chocolate — an early printed relative of the Wellesley fudge cake. Two points decide whether it works: the leavening and the chocolate glaze.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate in 1-ounce squares. Use 2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate in the batter and 2 oz more for the topping — not semisweet, which will make the cake cloying against an already sweet frosting.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually read as about 350°F. Thirty-five to forty minutes is long for a single shallow layer in a modern oven; start testing at 28 minutes.
- Pan sizeA "shallow cake pan" here is most likely one layer of roughly 8 inches square or round, about 2 inches deep. The batter is small, so a 9-inch pan will give a noticeably thinner layer.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons to 1¼ cups flour is nearly double current practice. Period baking powders were single-acting rather than double-acting; 1½ teaspoons is closer to the right lift today, and the full amount can leave a soapy edge.
- Order of mixingThe stiff whites go in before the melted chocolate, which is unusual and easy to botch. Fold the whites in only partly, then fold in the chocolate — cooled to just warm, or it will deflate and streak the batter.
- Wellesley frostingEvidently a companion recipe elsewhere in the booklet; a boiled white frosting (sugar syrup beaten into egg white) is the likely form. Any marshmallow or seven-minute frosting stands in. It must set firm before the chocolate goes on, or the two will marble together.
- The chocolate toppingTwo ounces of melted unsweetened chocolate poured over frosting sets hard and brittle and tastes bitter on its own, against the sugary frosting beneath. Spread it in thin passes with the back of a spoon while it is still fluid; it stiffens quickly on a cool surface.
- YieldOne shallow layer, cut into 8 or 9 squares.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate milling back to the Hannon/Baker mill of 1765 and was for a long time the best-known chocolate house in the United States; its promotional booklets, of which Choice Recipes is one, drew on contributions from Boston cooking-school figures including Fannie Merritt Farmer and Maria Parloa, whose measured, level-spoonful style is visible in the writing here. The Wellesley name points to Wellesley College, roughly fifteen miles west of Boston, and the cake belongs to the same family as the better-known Wellesley fudge cake, with a fudge-like coating, generally traced in student lore to the fudge-making that went on in college rooms in the 1890s, though the story is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe records precisely is a moment when unsweetened block chocolate, rather than cocoa powder, was the default baking chocolate in an American kitchen, and when a manufacturer could expect its brand name to be copied out by hand along with the method.