Home › Desserts-Puddings › Chocolate Ice-Box Cake
Chocolate Ice-Box Cake
½ doz. lady fingers 1½ cakes sweet chocolate 2 T water 2 T powdered sugar 4 eggs Melt chocolate in double boiler, add water and sugar, and yolks of eggs. When mixture has cooled fold beaten whites into it carefully. Line a mold with waxed paper, then lay a layer of lady fingers (split) in bottom and along sides; then pour a generous portion of the chocolate mixture in and then more lady fingers until all are used, the last layer to be lady fingers. Serve with sweetened whipped cream. 3 doz. lady fingers 1/2 lb. sweet butter 1 C sugar (powdered)
A classic charlotte-style icebox cake, and a good illustration of how much church-supper baking relied on raw egg. The chocolate mixture here is never cooked to a safe temperature, which is the reason for the caution above.
- Why this one failsThe yolks go into chocolate that has been melted in a double boiler, then the mixture is deliberately cooled before the raw whites are folded in. Nothing in the process holds the eggs at a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and the cake is then only chilled. A current recipe using a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs should be used instead.
- The chilling is not a fixRefrigeration slows bacterial growth but does not eliminate it, and an icebox cake sits for hours or overnight before serving.
- "1½ cakes sweet chocolate"Baking chocolate was sold in blocks scored into cakes or squares, and sizes varied by brand; one-ounce squares were common for unsweetened chocolate, while sweet chocolate bars often ran larger. The quantity here is genuinely ambiguous: it may mean anything from about an ounce and a half to six ounces depending on the brand the contributor had in her cupboard.
- T and CT is a tablespoon, C a cup. Powdered sugar in older recipes may mean finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today.
- The second ingredient listThe three lines after "Serve with sweetened whipped cream" — 3 doz. lady fingers, ½ lb. sweet butter, 1 C powdered sugar — carry no method. They may be a second version of the cake, or the start of the following recipe run together in printing. Sweet butter means unsalted.
- Lady fingersCommercial savoiardi are drier and firmer than soft home-baked lady fingers, and will absorb more moisture from a filling. The recipe calls for them split, which lines a mold neatly.
- YieldA dozen and a half split lady fingers would line and fill only a small mold, perhaps a quart or so, in modest portions.
The icebox cake belongs to a particular period in American home cooking: the decades after mechanical and ice-cooled refrigerators became common in middle-class kitchens but before home freezers were standard. It is often traced to the European charlotte russe, a mold lined with sponge fingers and filled with bavarian cream; the icebox cake proper, needing no baking and no unmolding skill — only a cold box and patience — belongs to the 1920s and after. Chocolate versions like this one, built on a raw egg foam, spread widely through church and club fundraising cookbooks, which were printed largely as received. The reliance on uncooked egg was unremarkable at the time; the connection between raw shell eggs and salmonellosis was not widely understood until much later in the century.