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Chocolate Fudge Cake
One cup of sugar One-half cup of butter Two eggs One-half cup of milk One and one-half cups of flour One and one-half teaspoons of Larkin Baking Powder Two squares of unsweetened chocolate One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Bake in two layers.
Filling. One and one-half cups of sugar; one-half cup of milk; two tablespoons of butter.
Make like fudge and spread between the layers, but do not ice the top of the cake.
A plain two-layer chocolate cake with a boiled fudge filling. The original assumes you know both the mixing order and the candy stage, since neither is stated.
- The hinge: the filling is candySugar, milk and butter cooked to the soft-ball stage (234-240F) and then beaten off the heat until it thickens and loses its gloss. Undercook it and it runs out from between the layers; beat it too long and it sets in the pan before you can spread it.
- Larkin productsLarkin was a Buffalo mail-order house, and the book exists to sell its groceries. Any double-acting baking powder and any vanilla extract will do, in the same amounts.
- Chocolate squaresA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two ounces total. Melt it over hot water and let it cool slightly before adding, so the hot chocolate does not melt the creamed butter.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the melted chocolate and vanilla, then the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. The batter is stiff for a modern layer cake; that is correct.
- Oven and pansTwo 8-inch round pans, greased and floured, in a moderate oven, about 350F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. The original gives no pan size, temperature or time at all.
- MilkWhole milk in both cake and filling. Lower-fat milk is likely to give a thinner, less rich filling.
- Yield and servingOne 8-inch two-layer cake, eight to ten slices. The bare top is deliberate: the recipe explicitly says not to ice it.
Good Things to Eat belongs to the advertising cookbooks issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, a soap manufacturer that expanded into groceries and household goods sold by mail and through neighborhood "Larkin Clubs." Recipes calling for Larkin Baking Powder and Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract by name were the point of the book, and hundreds of firms published similar collections in the same years. The cake itself sits at the moment fudge crossed over from confectionery to baking: fudge-making is generally traced to American women's colleges in the late 1880s and 1890s, where boiling sugar over a chafing dish was a dormitory pastime, and by the 1910s the word was attached to anything with that dense, cooked-sugar richness. Using the fudge as a filling rather than an icing was a practical choice as much as a stylistic one, since the surface of a fudge frosting dulls and cracks within a day.