Home › Cake Making and Baking › Chocolate Coffee Cake
Chocolate Coffee Cake
1 cup sugar 1 egg 3 tablespoons butter ¼ cup milk ½ cup strong liquid coffee ¼ cup grated chocolate 2 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Bake in a loaf or flat pan.
A terse, ingredients-only formula of the kind Five Roses printed by the hundred, assuming the reader already knew how a butter cake is assembled. The missing method, oven temperature and time are the whole job here.
- The order of workCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the egg, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the combined milk and coffee, with the chocolate stirred in. Adding the cold liquid all at once to the creamed butter risks splitting the mixture and a coarser crumb.
- Grated chocolateA block chocolate, most likely plain and unsweetened, grated on a box grater rather than melted. A quarter cup grated is roughly 1 oz (28 g); chop it fine or use the same weight of unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled, for a smoother batter.
- Strong liquid coffeeBrewed coffee, made about double strength and cooled — not instant granules and not espresso. Cooled leftover coffee will do.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard Canadian spring wheat flour, close to modern all-purpose but slightly stronger. Two cups is about 9 oz (250 g); measure by weight if you can, and mix only until the flour disappears, since this batter is stiff enough to toughen easily.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350°F (175°C). A loaf pan takes roughly 45–55 minutes, a flat 8-inch square pan 25–30 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre.
- Liquid ratioThree-quarters of a cup of liquid to two cups of flour makes a thick batter, likely to need spreading rather than pouring. Resist the urge to thin it.
- YieldOne 8½ x 4½-inch loaf or one 8-inch square pan, about eight to ten servings. The original gives no icing.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed to purchasers of its Five Roses flour; it circulated very widely in Canadian homes in the years around the First World War. Its recipes are compressed to the point of shorthand — a list of quantities and a single line of direction — because the audience was assumed to know cake method already and the book's real purpose was to keep one brand of flour in the kitchen. "Coffee cake" here means what it says: a cake flavoured with coffee, as distinct from the German-American crumb-topped cake that also carries the name.