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Chocolate Drop Cakes
Whites of 4 eggs 2 ounces grated chocolate 1 cup sugar 3 ounces flour Beat the eggs to a stiff froth; add the sugar, then the chocolate. melted, and the flour. Drop from a spoon on buttered tins, allowing room for the mixture to spread. Bake in a quick oven.
A four-ingredient meringue-style drop cake that depends entirely on how much air survives the folding. Everything else is arithmetic.
- Fold, do not stirThe egg whites are the only leavening here. Beat them stiff, then fold the sugar, cooled chocolate and flour in with a spatula in as few strokes as will combine them. Beaten in, the batter slackens and the cakes bake flat and tough.
- "Quick oven"Period sources put this somewhere in the 400-425F range, though usage varies and some go hotter. Either way it is hot for something this thin and sugary: expect 8-10 minutes, and pull them the moment the edges firm.
- Weights to volume3 ounces of flour is about 2/3 cup, spooned and levelled. 2 ounces of grated chocolate is two standard 1-oz squares of baking chocolate; the recipe does not say which kind, though plain unsweetened cake chocolate is the likely reading, in which case the cup of sugar carries all the sweetness.
- Melted, then cooledThe instruction is "the chocolate, melted." Let it cool until barely warm before it goes in. Hot chocolate slumps the whites and you lose the volume you just beat in.
- Buttered tinsA buttered sheet is what the book had. Parchment is better for a high-sugar batter that wants to weld itself to metal, and it lets you lift the cakes off before they cool and set hard.
- Room to spreadTake the warning seriously: the batter is loose and these run. Teaspoon-sized mounds, three inches apart.
- YieldProbably around two dozen small cakes, each a couple of inches across once spread; the recipe gives no yield. Best eaten within a day or so, and they will soften in humid weather.
Chocolate drop cakes of this kind sit on the line between a cookie and a meringue, and they belong to a family of egg-white confections that appear widely in American cookbooks of the period. A recipe calling for whites alone leaves four yolks to be used elsewhere, and cookbooks of the era often pair such recipes.