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Chocolate Fudge Cake
(2 eggs) 2 cups sifted Swans Down Cake Flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon soda ¼ teaspoon salt ½ cup butter or other shortening 1 cup sugar 2 egg yolks, well beaten 3 squares Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate, melted 1¼ cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder, soda, and salt, and sift together three times. Cream butter thoroughly, add sugar gradually, and cream together until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks and chocolate, then flour, alternately with milk, a small amount at a time. Beat after each addition until smooth. Add vanilla. Fold in egg whites. Bake in two greased 9-inch layer pans in moderate oven (350° F.) 30 minutes. Put layers together and cover top and sides of cake with fudge frosting. Double recipe to make three 10-inch layers.
Plenty more where this recipe came from!
Lake Bertels ....
A standard 1930s Swans Down layer cake, printed with the flour company's own method. Several of the quantities have lost their fractions in this printing, so read the list against the notes below before you start.
- MeasurementsThe printed page was checked and the fractions read as our text now gives them: a quarter teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon soda, half a cup butter, and 1¼ cups milk. These amounts balance the 1 cup sugar and 2 cups flour as expected.
- Sifted flour, measured after siftingThe instruction to sift once, measure, then sift three more times is not decorative. Cake flour compacts in the box, and 2 cups scooped straight from it can weigh 20 percent more than 2 cups sifted and spooned. Spoon the sifted flour lightly into the cup and level it.
- Cake flourSwans Down is a bleached soft-wheat flour of about 8 percent protein. Any modern cake flour substitutes directly. In a pinch, replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, though the crumb will be slightly firmer.
- Unsweetened chocolateThree squares means three ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, as sold in one-ounce squares at the time. Melt over hot water or in short bursts in a microwave and let it cool to barely warm before adding, or it will curdle the creamed butter.
- Alternating flour and milkAdd the dry and liquid in small alternating amounts, beginning and ending with flour. Beating only until smooth after each addition keeps gluten development low; overbeating at this stage is what produces a tough crumb.
- Oven and pans350°F is correct as printed. Two 9-inch layers at 30 minutes is about right, but start checking at 25; the cake is done when a skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs and the edges have just pulled from the pan. Grease and line the bases with parchment; the original asks only that the pans be greased.
- Folding the whitesThe stiffly beaten whites go in last and are folded, not stirred. This batter is heavy with chocolate and will deflate them quickly, so work in a third first to slacken the batter, then the rest in two additions.
- Yield and frostingTwo 9-inch layers serve 10 to 12. No fudge frosting quantity is given here; a cooked fudge icing using about 2 cups sugar, 2 ounces chocolate, milk and butter will cover top and sides of a two-layer cake.
This is a manufacturer's recipe that migrated into a community cookbook, which was the normal route for such things in the 1930s. General Foods owned both Swans Down cake flour and Baker's chocolate, and its test kitchen published matched recipes calling for both by brand name; contributors copied them off the box or out of the free booklets and submitted them to collections like this one under their own names. The closing line, "Plenty more where this recipe came from," is advertising copy that travelled along with the text. The heavy sifting and the careful alternating of flour and milk are hallmarks of the era's cake-flour promotion, which sold soft wheat flour on the promise of a fine, tender crumb that home bakers could not get from all-purpose.