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Brown Stone Front
Mix together ½ cup grated chocolate 1½ cups sweet milk 1 cup brown sugar 1 beaten egg yolk Boil and let cool before using, then add ½ cup butter ¾ cup brown sugar 2 eggs (well beaten) 1 teaspoon soda dis- 1 solved in ¼ cup sweet milk 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Five Roses flour to make as stiff as ordinary layer cake. Frost on top and between layers.
A layer cake built on a cooked chocolate custard, folded into a creamed batter — the same trick that gives devil's food its dark colour and moist crumb. The original assumes you know what a layer cake batter should feel like, and gives neither flour quantity nor oven setting.
- The hinge: cook and cool the baseThe hinge: boil and cool the base -- The chocolate, milk, brown sugar and yolk are boiled together, then must be cooled before they go into the rest of the batter, as the recipe directs. Adding the mixture warm will melt the butter and break the batter.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened block chocolate grated on a box grater — roughly 1½ to 2 oz for a half cup, loosely packed. Cocoa powder is not a direct substitute here; the recipe relies on the cocoa butter for richness.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that period recipes often called for. Use whole milk.
- Flour quantity"As stiff as ordinary layer cake" is genuinely open-ended. In practice a batter of this size will take somewhere around 2 to 2½ cups of all-purpose flour; add it gradually and stop when the batter drops thickly from the spoon rather than pouring.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda reacts with the brown sugar and chocolate, both acidic; the baking powder gives a second lift in the oven. Dissolving the soda in milk before adding it, as directed, prevents dark specks and bitter patches.
- Oven and tinsNo oven setting is given. Bake at 350F, divided between two or three greased 8-inch round tins, 25 to 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- FrostingNone is specified. A period-appropriate choice is a boiled white icing or a simple chocolate butter icing; you will need about 2 cups for top and filling.
- YieldOne two- or three-layer 8-inch cake, twelve slices.
The name is usually explained as a reference to the chocolate-brown sandstone row houses that lined respectable streets in cities such as New York and Boston from the mid-nineteenth century, though this connection is traditional rather than documented. Recipes under the name appear in North American community and milling-company cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often with a cooked chocolate base of this kind. Its presence in the Five Roses Cook Book — published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour to Canadian households — is typical of the genre, which drew heavily on recipes contributed by home cooks.