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Chocolate Cream Cake
3 eggs beaten separately. 2 1/2 cups flour. 1 3/4 cups sugar. 1 cup sweet milk. 1 scant cup butter. 3 level teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 lb. chocolate melted over hot water, with 1 tablespoonful of vanilla.
This is a formula rather than a method — Mrs. Wilson gives proportions and leaves the assembly to the cook. Everything needed to fill the gaps is below.
- Method the list assumesCream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the melted chocolate and vanilla. Add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last.
- No oven temperature is givenA butter cake of this richness bakes at 350F. Two 9-inch layers take about 25-30 minutes; a single deep pan will need 40-45.
- "Sweet milk"Ordinary fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk that older recipes paired with saleratus. Any whole milk works.
- A scant cup of butterJust under 8 ounces, so roughly 200-215 g, or a shade less than two sticks. It should be soft enough to cream but not oily.
- The chocolateA quarter pound is 4 ounces of block chocolate; in baking of this period an unsweetened cake of chocolate is the likeliest reading. Modern semisweet or bittersweet will make the cake noticeably sweeter and softer; use unsweetened to match the sugar as written.
- VanillaA full tablespoon is three times the usual modern teaspoon. A teaspoon or two is plenty with today's extract.
- SaltNone is listed; salted butter would have supplied some. If your butter is unsalted, you may want about half a teaspoon added with the flour.
- "Cream" means the fillingIn this period the name usually pointed to a cake split or built in layers and filled with a cream or custard filling, which this formula does not describe. Whipped cream, a vanilla pastry cream, or a boiled milk frosting are all period-appropriate.
- YieldTwo 9-inch layers, serving ten to twelve. The batter is heavy enough that a single 9x13 pan also works.
Mrs. Wilson's New Cook Book collects the kitchen writing of Mary A. Wilson, who wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal around the First World War and was known for domestic-science economy — substitutions, conservation of sugar and fat, and short formulas a housewife could copy onto a card. This entry shows that format surviving into book form: proportions only, on the assumption that a cook already knew how to cream butter and sugar and fold in beaten whites. The cake belongs to the family of American layer cakes that spread once chemical baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, and "cream cake" in that era commonly described the filling rather than the batter — a plain or chocolate layer split and spread with custard or whipped cream.