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Manitou Black Cake
3 ounces chocolate Yolk of 1 egg (save white for frosting) 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup sugar 1⅜ cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon soda ½ cup milk (making 1½ cups in all) 1 teaspoon vanilla Pinch of salt Melt the chocolate over hot water, and add gradually to it the well-beaten yolk of egg mixed with the 1 cup of milk (first mentioned above). Cook till it thickens slightly. Cream the butter and sugar, add the chocolate mixture and stir well. Add the mixed and sifted dry ingredients alternately with the remaining half cup of milk. Mix well. Flavor. The batter should be quite thin. Bake. When cool, frost with boiled frosting, using the leftover white of egg.
A thin-battered dark chocolate cake in the devil's-food family, from a milling-company book that assumed every cook already knew her oven. The gaps are in the baking, not the mixing.
- The chocolateThree ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-oz squares then and now. Modern semi-sweet or chips will throw the sugar and the texture off; if you use them, the cake stops being this cake.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, somewhat stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; 1⅜ cups is 1 cup plus 6 tablespoons, roughly 170 g.
- The custard step is the hingeMelting the chocolate and cooking it with yolk and milk until it thickens slightly is what gives the cake its colour and its moisture. Keep it over hot, not boiling, water and pull it the moment it coats a spoon, or you will have sweet scrambled egg to strain out.
- "Bake" means 350F"Bake" -- The book gives no temperature, no pan and no time, because ranges were judged by hand. A moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent; go by a skewer test rather than the clock.
- Both powder and sodaThe soda neutralises the acidity of the chocolate and shifts the colour toward red-brown. The baking powder does the lifting. Do not substitute one for the other.
- A thin batter is correctThe instruction is deliberate. Pour rather than spread, and grease and line the pans well, since a loose batter climbs and sticks.
- Boiled frostingAn Italian-meringue-style icing: sugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F on a thermometer, beaten in a thin stream into the stiffly whipped reserved white. Spread it while it is still warm and workable.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose Five Roses brand was one of the dominant Canadian household flours in the early twentieth century; its recipes were drawn largely from contributions sent in by users of the flour. Manitou is a town in southern Manitoba, and the word itself is Algonquian, for spirit or power. "Black cake" elsewhere in the English-speaking world usually means a dense boozy fruitcake; here the name appears to refer simply to the darkness of the crumb. Cooking chocolate with milk and egg into a custard before it meets the batter appears in other North American cake recipes of the period.