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Chocolate Powder (Cup butter cups flour cup milk)
cup butter 1½ cups flour ½ cup milk 1 cup walnut meats 1 cup sugar 2 egg yolks 21 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons hot water 1 teaspoon vanilla salt Cream butter; add sugar, yolks of eggs well beaten and flour in which baking powder has been sifted, milk, and chocolate which has been moistened with hot water; beat well and add walnut meats. Bake in buttered jelly cake pans about twenty minutes.
Spread one cake with one half cup of Lowney's Sweet Chocolate Powder moistened with one fourth cup boiling water and flavored with one teaspoon vanilla. Sprinkle with broken walnuts, cover with other cake, and ice with white frosting. See colored illustration, Plate IX, opposite.
A two-layer walnut cake with a chocolate-powder filling, printed as advertising copy for a chocolate company's own product. The ingredient list has come through with several gaps, so read it against the method before starting.
- The missing chocolateThe ingredient list names no chocolate at all, yet the method calls for "chocolate which has been moistened with hot water" in the batter, plus half a cup of sweet chocolate powder for the filling. For the batter, reckon on about a quarter cup of sweetened cocoa or chocolate powder slaked in the 2 tablespoons hot water.
- Lowney's Sweet Chocolate PowderA sweetened, ready-ground chocolate sold for drinking and baking, no longer made. The nearest current stand-in is a sweetened drinking-chocolate powder rather than unsweetened cocoa, which on its own would make the filling bitter.
- "cup butter"The quantity has dropped out. For 1½ cups flour and 1 cup sugar, half a cup of butter is the likeliest reading and works well; a full cup would give a much richer batter.
- "21 teaspoons baking powder"Almost certainly a typesetting slip for 2 teaspoons, a common rate for 1½ cups flour in books of this date. Twenty-one would be inedible.
- SaltListed with no amount, as was common. A quarter teaspoon is right for this quantity of batter.
- Jelly cake pansShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across. Butter and flour them, or line the bases with parchment; this is a fairly heavy nut batter and will stick.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual before oven thermostats were standard. Twenty minutes for a thin layer implies a moderate oven, around 350F, with the layers tested at 18 minutes.
- The fillingHalf a cup of chocolate powder stirred with a quarter cup boiling water sets into a thick paste as it cools, so spread it while warm and assemble at once. It is a spread rather than a buttercream and will not hold a piped edge.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, ten to twelve servings. Frost the top with a plain boiled or confectioners' white icing, as the original directs, to offset the sweet filling.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate manufacturers of the period, and it belongs to a genre that flourished between about 1890 and 1920: the free or cheap cookbook issued by a food company in which every relevant recipe names the firm's own product. That is why this cake gives no generic quantity of cocoa but instead directs the reader to "Lowney's Sweet Chocolate Powder" and refers to a full-color plate opposite, the color printing itself being a mark of how much a manufacturer would spend on such a book. Sweetened chocolate powders were sold chiefly for making drinking chocolate, and their use as an instant cake filling, simply slaked with boiling water, is a neat piece of promotion for a second application of the same tin. The layer cake baked in "jelly cake pans" and stacked with a filling was by then the standard American festive cake, made practical by chemical baking powder, which appears here in the confident quantities that a manufactured leavener allowed.