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French Chocolate Cake
1½ t baking powder 3 egg whites Vanilla Dark Part 1 C sugar ⅓ C butter Mrs. Ida McKibben. 1/2 C grated chocolate 1/2 C milk 1½ C flour 1½ t baking powder 3 egg yolks Vanilla Bake in dark and light layers and spread with the following custard between:
Custard Filling: 1 t cornstarch 1 t vanilla Pinch salt 1 egg 1 C milk ¼ C sugar
A two-batter layer cake — one pale, one chocolate — stacked with a stirred custard between. The measurements are given in the shorthand of a church-supper collection: C is cup, t is teaspoon.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given, as was normal when these books were compiled. Bake thin butter layers at 350F in two greased 8- or 9-inch round pans, 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
- The flour quantity"12 C flour" cannot be right for a batter built on half a cup of butter and one cup of sugar; a cake of this size takes about 1½ cups. Treat the printed figure as unusable and go by the proportions of the other ingredients.
- Grated chocolateThis means a solid block of chocolate scraped on a grater rather than cocoa powder; it was most often unsweetened baking chocolate, though sweetened cake chocolate was also used. Chopped unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled, is the closest match; if you substitute cocoa, about 6 tablespoons plus a little extra butter is the usual equivalent.
- Separated eggsThe whites go into the light batter and the yolks into the dark, which is why the recipe splits them. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last so the pale layer stays tender rather than tough.
- The custard is the hingeOne egg, one cup milk, ¼ cup sugar, a teaspoon of cornstarch and a pinch of salt, cooked over low heat or in a double boiler and stirred constantly until it coats a spoon — roughly 8 to 10 minutes. It must not boil or the egg will curdle and the filling will break. Add the vanilla off the heat and chill before spreading.
- AssemblyA thin stirred custard will not hold a tall cake together. Cool the layers completely, spread the chilled custard between them only, and refrigerate the finished cake; it is best eaten the same day.
- YieldA two-layer cake serving 8 to 10.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks seem often to have used "French" loosely, as a mark of refinement rather than a claim of origin. The light-and-dark pairing here is arguably a cousin of marble cake, a form generally said to have been familiar in American home baking by the later 1800s, though early marble cakes were as often darkened with molasses and spice as with chocolate. The recipe here is credited to the woman who contributed it, Mrs. Ida McKibben.