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Chocolate Pound Cake
½ cup Lowney's Premium Chocolate, grated 2 cups flour 1/4 cup brandy 1 cup citron cut in small pieces 1 teaspoon salt Cream butter; add sugar gradually, yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, flour, citron, salt. Beat well; cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Pour into buttered pans and bake one hour in a moderate oven.
This cake may be baked in a buttered dripping pan and when cold cut into fancy shapes and iced. 1 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 4 eggs cup Lowney's Cocoa
A rich creamed pound cake batter carrying grated chocolate, cocoa, brandy and citron. The ingredient list arrives in two pieces, so read it through before you begin and set out everything by weight.
- Chocolate and cocoaLowney's Premium Chocolate was unsweetened baking chocolate; grate it for the half cup called for (roughly 2 oz off a bar, since grated chocolate takes up a lot of room). The cocoa is plain cocoa powder for baking, not a sweetened drinking mixture; the book does not say whether it was alkalised.
- Where the chocolate goesThe method as printed never mentions the chocolate, cocoa or brandy. One workable reading is to add the grated chocolate and cocoa with the flour and the brandy with the yolks, but the book gives no instruction either way.
- Cocoa quantityThe amount of cocoa is given without its fraction and cannot be recovered from the text. A quarter cup is consistent with the flour and butter here, but that is a judgement, not what the book says.
- Moderate ovenUsually read today as about 350-375F. A pound cake this dense in a loaf pan will want the full hour and often longer; test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. Baked that way the batter is only an inch or so deep and will bake much faster than the hour given for deep pans; start checking from about 25 minutes.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced tubs around the winter holidays. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Creaming and foldingThe whole lift comes from air. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale, and fold the stiff whites in with a light hand at the very end; overworking here gives a heavy, greasy crumb.
- YieldClose to 3 lb of batter, enough to fill two loaf pans rather than one; the recipe says "pans", plural.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the American chocolate makers that followed Baker's into the branded-cookbook trade. The book puts the company's chocolate and cocoa into recipes home cooks already knew, and a pound cake was the obvious vehicle: the name comes from the old English formula of a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, and by the early twentieth century the proportions had loosened while the creaming method stayed. The citron and brandy mark this as the older, fruited style of pound cake closer to a plain wedding or bride's cake, and the recipe adds a note about baking it flat and cutting it into fancy shapes.