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Chocolate Marshmallow Cake
Add four squares melted chocolate to Silver Cake.
Bake in layers, and fill and cover with Marshmallow Frosting.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have Silver Cake and Marshmallow Frosting already in hand from elsewhere in the book. A few translations make it workable.
- "Four squares" of chocolateBaking chocolate of the period was conventionally sold in one-ounce squares, so this most likely means 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled slightly. Modern unsweetened baking bars are generally still scored into 1 oz squares; do not substitute semisweet, which will throw the sugar badly off in an already sweet cake.
- What Silver Cake isA white butter cake leavened with beaten egg whites only, the counterpart to Gold Cake made with the yolks. If you are borrowing a modern recipe, use a white layer cake with roughly 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour and 6 to 8 egg whites.
- Adding the chocolateFour ounces of chocolate stiffens a white batter noticeably. Fold it into the creamed butter and sugar while it is still fluid but not hot, and slacken with 2 to 3 tablespoons of milk if the batter tightens before the whites go in.
- "Bake in layers"No pan size or temperature is given. Two or three 9-inch rounds at 350F, 22 to 30 minutes depending on depth, until a tester comes out clean. The chocolate makes the usual golden-edge cue useless, so go by touch and tester.
- Marshmallow FrostingThe usual period approach is a boiled-sugar meringue: syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238-240F, poured in a thin stream into stiffly beaten egg whites and beaten until it holds. Follow the book's own frosting entry, as period marshmallow frostings varied. A thermometer is more reliable than the old cold-water test for judging the syrup; note that the hot syrup only partly sets and warms the whites and should not be assumed to cook them through.
- Filling and coveringMarshmallow frosting sets fast and turns tacky as it cools. Spread it on cooled layers while it is still warm and workable, and finish the top and sides in one pass rather than trying to smooth it later.
- YieldA two- or three-layer 9-inch cake, 10 to 12 servings. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between slices.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard, was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like most manufacturer cookbooks of the era it exists to move product: hence the steady stream of entries that take an ordinary cake and add squares of Lowney's chocolate. Silver Cake and Gold Cake were a matched pair whose origin is traditionally explained by thrift, one using the whites and the other the yolks so that nothing was wasted, and both appear to have been familiar in American home baking well before 1907. Marshmallow frosting belongs to the same moment: commercial marshmallow paste and confectioners' interest in whipped boiled syrup made the glossy white icing fashionable in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it was often paired with dark chocolate cake.