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Chocolate Sponge
1/2 cup butter 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 cup prepared powdered cocoa 1/4 teaspoon clove 3 eggs 1/2 cup cold water 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add cocoa, yolks of eggs well beaten, sugar mixed with cinnamon and clove, and water. Beat the whites of eggs, and add to first mixture alternately with flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Bake in small tins from fifteen to twenty minutes.
Devil's Food Cake I 1/2 cup butter 5 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt Yolks 4 eggs Whites 4 eggs 1 cup milk 4 squares chocolate 2 2/3 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, and add gradually one-half the sugar. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon-colored, and add gradually remaining sugar. Combine mixtures, and add alternately milk and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt; then add whites of eggs beaten stiff, chocolate melted, and vanilla. Bake forty-five to fifty minutes in an angel cake pan. Cover with White Mountain Cream.
A butter cake leavened with baking powder and stiff whites, spiced with cinnamon and clove — closer to a modern cupcake batter than to a fatless sponge. The book gives no oven temperature, which is the main gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Small tins of this batter suit a moderate oven, around 350F, at which fifteen to twenty minutes is about right; test with a skewer at fifteen.
- "Small tins"Standard muffin or patty tins, greased. A half-cup butter, one-cup flour batter fills about twelve to fourteen cups two-thirds full.
- Prepared powdered cocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder. "Prepared" was used loosely in this period for commercially processed cocoa sold ready to use, and it is not clear whether alkalised cocoa is meant; either natural or Dutch-process works here, since baking powder, not soda, does the lifting.
- Order of operationsThe whites go in alternately with the flour and add some lift of their own alongside the baking powder. Treat them gently rather than beating them down, and get the batter into the tins promptly.
- Water, not milkThe half-cup of cold water keeps the crumb light; milk, with its fat and protein, would be expected to give a richer, somewhat heavier result.
- The spicingA teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter-teaspoon of clove against one cup of flour is assertive by current taste. Halve the clove if you want the chocolate forward.
- On the Devil's Food that followsIts four squares of chocolate are baking chocolate at one ounce each, four ounces total. No temperature is given; forty-five to fifty minutes in a tube pan suggests a moderate oven, around 350F. White Mountain Cream is the boiled-sugar-and-egg-white frosting given elsewhere in these books.