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Filling for Fudge Cake
⅛ cup grated chocolate 1 cup sugar ½ cup sweet milk Butter size of ½ egg Boil until thick enough to spread on cake without running. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla before spreading on cake. This is really a fine cake for cutting and will keep several days. Walnuts may be added.
This is a small batch of soft fudge — essentially penuche method — cooked on the stovetop and spread while still warm. The whole recipe turns on how far you boil it.
- The hinge: cook to soft-ball"Boil until thick enough to spread" means the soft-ball stage, 235–240F on a candy thermometer, or a drop that flattens into a soft lump in cold water. Under that it runs off the cake; much over it sets hard and cracks while you spread.
- Butter size of ½ eggA whole egg's worth of butter is about 2 ounces, so half is roughly 1 ounce, or 2 tablespoons.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk. The term existed to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which older recipes called for by name when they wanted acid to react with soda.
- Grated chocolate⅛ cup is two tablespoons, perhaps half an ounce of chocolate once you allow for how loosely gratings pack; chocolate sold in blocks at this date was usually unsweetened. Chopped or coarsely grated unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; cocoa powder is not, since it lacks the cocoa butter that gives the filling its body.
- Stir, then stopStir only until the sugar dissolves and the chocolate melts, then let it boil with minimal disturbance. Agitating a hot sugar syrup encourages large crystals and a grainy filling.
- Add vanilla off the heatAs instructed, vanilla goes in after cooking. Added earlier the alcohol and aroma boil away. Let the mixture cool a minute or two before beating in walnuts so they don't sink through.
- YieldRoughly a cupful, about enough to fill and thinly top a single layer cake. Double it if you want a generous coating on the sides as well.
- Working timeIt thickens fast as it cools. Have the cake layers out, level and ready before the pan comes off the burner; if it stiffens too far, warm the pan briefly over low heat.
Fudge fillings spread through North American home baking after fudge itself caught on in American women's colleges in the late 1880s and 1890s, and by the time the Five Roses book was compiled a boiled sugar-and-chocolate frosting was a familiar item in a Canadian kitchen. Books like this one were published by flour millers -- Lake of the Woods Milling Company, in the Five Roses case -- and assembled largely from recipes sent in by customers; the instructions accordingly read like one cook talking to another: no pan size, no timing, and an aside that the cake keeps well and takes walnuts if you like. The note that it "will keep several days" is worth reading as praise. A boiled sugar icing seals the cut surface of a cake and slows drying, a practical virtue when cake was made on baking day and eaten through the week.