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Devil's Food Cake, Whipped Cream
1. Melt 6 squares chocolate with 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda and 1/3 cup milk. Set aside to cool while making main portion of cake. 2. Cream 3/4 cup margarine with 1 1/4 cups sugar. 3. Add 2 eggs, unbeaten, and beat well for 3 minutes. 4. Combine 2 1/2 cups sifted flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, and 3/8 teaspoon salt, and add to the creamed mixture alternately with 2/3 cup milk. 5. Add chocolate mixture, with 1 teaspoon vanilla. 6. Pour into 3 well greased or papered round or square cake pans and bake in moderate oven (375 degrees) about 15 minutes. Serve in slices with whipped cream between each slice and on top.
A three-layer devil's food built the old way, with a cooked chocolate-and-soda paste stirred into a creamed batter. The layers are thin and bake fast, so the timing is the part to watch.
- The chocolate squares"Squares" means 1-ounce blocks of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 6 squares is 6 oz. Do not substitute semisweet or chips; the recipe's sugar and the soda both assume unsweetened chocolate.
- Melt gentlyChocolate, sugar, soda and milk should go over low heat or a double boiler, stirred until smooth. The soda reacts with the acidity of the chocolate as it warms, which darkens the paste and gives the cake its reddish-brown crumb. Let it cool to barely warm before it meets the batter or it will loosen the creamed fat.
- Both leavenings are intendedBoth leavenings are used -- 4 teaspoons baking powder alongside the soda in the chocolate mixture is a high proportion for 2 1/2 cups flour, but it is what the recipe prints. The soda's job here is as much colour and flavour as lift.
- 3/8 teaspoon saltMeasure as 1/4 plus 1/8 teaspoon. If using salted butter in place of the margarine, cut it to a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Unbeaten eggs, beaten inAdding the eggs whole and beating three full minutes is the aeration step; a stand mixer on medium does it. Have the eggs at room temperature so the creamed mixture does not curdle.
- Oven temperatureThe book calls 375F moderate, at the upper end of what that word usually covers today. Take the stated 375F rather than dropping to 350F, since the layers are shallow and want to set quickly.
- Pans and timingThe recipe gives no pan size, only round or square; three 8-inch or 9-inch pans suit this quantity, greased or, as the recipe allows, papered. Start checking before the stated 15 minutes. The layers are done when the centre springs back and a tester comes out with a crumb or two, not wet batter.
- Finishing and yieldWhipped cream between the layers and on top means the cake must be assembled close to serving and kept refrigerated; it will not hold overnight the way a buttercream would. Sweeten the cream lightly, about 1 tablespoon sugar per cup. Serves 10 to 12.
Devil's food emerged in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, its name generally read as the dark counterpart to the pale, eggwhite angel food cake that preceded it. The characteristic reddish cast comes from alkali meeting the natural acidity of unsweetened chocolate, which is exactly what step one of this recipe engineers by cooking soda into the chocolate and milk before anything else happens. The use of margarine in place of butter places it as everyday household baking rather than an occasion cake: a layer cake economical enough for regular use, dressed up at the last moment with whipped cream instead of a cooked frosting.