Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Creole Cake
Creole Cake
1 C sugar 2 eggs, beaten light 3 T melted butter or substitute 2 oz. melted chocolate 1/2 C milk 1⅓ C Swansdown flour 2½ t Royal paking powder 1/4 t salt 12 t cinnamon Gradually beat sugar into eggs; add the melted butter and chocolate and alternately the milk and flour sifted with the other dry ingredients. Bake in a pan 7 x 11 inches, about 25 minutes. Cover with Creole Frosting: 2 T strong black coffee 2 T cocoa 12 t vanilla 1 C Confectioner's sugar Mrs. R. M. Dillon.
A plain chocolate sheet cake from a church fundraiser book, written for cooks who already knew what a cake batter should look like. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature and two measurements that read oddly.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which is common in community cookbooks of this era. A 7 x 11 inch sheet of this depth suggests a moderate oven, around 350F, for the 25 minutes stated; test with a skewer at 22 minutes.
- Swansdown flourSwans Down was and is a soft-wheat cake flour, lower in protein than all-purpose. If you substitute all-purpose flour, remove about 2 tablespoons per cup and the crumb will still be slightly firmer.
- Royal baking powderA brand still sold. In this period Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder rather than the double-acting types that dominate now; any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same measure. 2 1/2 teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of flour is on the generous side, so do not round up.
- The cinnamon and vanilla amountsBoth are printed as "12 t," which cannot be right. In cakes of this proportion a half teaspoon of each is the conventional reading, and a half teaspoon of cinnamon is about the most this quantity of chocolate will carry without tasting spiced.
- Melted chocolateTwo ounces means unsweetened baking chocolate, not eating chocolate. Melt it gently and let it cool to barely warm before it meets the eggs, or it will set the beaten egg into threads.
- The frosting is unfinishedThe frosting is given without a method -- coffee, cocoa, vanilla and a cup of confectioner's sugar. Sift the cocoa with the sugar and add the coffee gradually; 2 tablespoons of liquid to a cup of sugar will be stiff, so let it down with a few more drops of coffee, or a spoonful of soft butter, until it will spread.
- Butter or substitute"Substitute" in this period generally meant lard, margarine or a vegetable shortening. Three tablespoons is very little fat for the flour, so expect a firm rather than tender crumb; butter gives the best flavour of the options.
- YieldA 7 x 11 pan cuts into about 12 squares, served from the pan as a plain everyday cake.
Cookbooks like this one were sold to raise money, and the recipes in them are dated less by their techniques than by their brand names: Swans Down flour and Royal baking powder were both heavily advertised in the early twentieth century, and contributors wrote them into recipes the way we might specify a particular brand of cocoa. "Creole" is often said to have been attached to chocolate-and-coffee confections in this period, and the coffee-and-cocoa frosting may be what earns the name here, though the association is a plausible reading rather than a documented one, and the link to New Orleans is a matter of association rather than documented origin.