Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Chocolate Refrigerator Cake
Chocolate Refrigerator Cake
1/2 lb. melted sweet chocolate 3 tablespoons sugar 3 tablespoons water 4 egg-yolks, well beaten 30 lady fingers 4 egg-whites, beaten stiff 1 cup whipped cream Add sugar, water and egg yolks to the melted chocolate. Cook slowly till thick and smooth, stirring constantly. Fold in the egg-whites. Line a mold with lady fingers, place layer on bottom also, then layer of the filling, continue alternating lady fingers and filling until all used up, finishing with lady fingers. Put in refrigerator for at least 15 hours. When ready to serve, turn cake out on cake plate and cover with whipped cream. Serves 12.
A charlotte-style icebox cake from the era when a home refrigerator was still a selling point. The chocolate base is briefly cooked, but the four beaten egg whites are folded in raw and the assembled cake is only chilled, so the finished dessert contains uncooked egg.
- Why this one failsFour egg whites go in raw and are never heated again; overnight refrigeration does nothing to eliminate Salmonella, which can be present in the white as well as the yolk. The brief "cook slowly till thick" stage applies only to the yolk-and-chocolate base, and no temperature is given for it. If you want a chocolate icebox cake, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked meringue.
- Sweet chocolateIn this period "sweet chocolate" meant a sweetened dark eating chocolate, roughly what is sold now as sweet dark or German-style sweet chocolate — considerably sweeter than modern bittersweet. Half a pound is 8 oz.
- Lady fingersBaked sponge fingers, firm rather than cake-soft, so they hold their shape against the filling. The recipe gives no mold size, so thirty pieces imply something loaf- or charlotte-sized; a loaf pan is a workable substitute.
- The moldNo size is specified. The instruction to turn the cake out onto a plate rather than cut it in the dish points to a lined charlotte mold or loaf pan, with the fingers around the sides as well as the bottom.
- Fifteen hoursNot an error and not padding. The filling has no gelatin, so it sets purely by chilling and by the fingers absorbing moisture; a shorter rest leaves it too soft to unmold.
- The whipped creamThe single cup is unsweetened as written and used as a coating rather than a filling.
- YieldTwelve servings is realistic for a loaf-sized mold — the filling is very rich and slices are cut thin.
Refrigerator or "icebox" cakes belong to the 1920s and 1930s, when mechanical household refrigeration spread in American cities and cookbooks began advertising desserts that required no oven at all. The form itself is much older: lining a mold with lady fingers and filling it with a cold cream is the method of the French charlotte russe, generally traced to early nineteenth-century pastry work, and the icebox cake is essentially that dish rebuilt around melted chocolate and a home refrigerator.