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Filling for Chocolate Cream Cake
4 tablespoonsfuls of sweet cream. 1 cup XXXX sugar. 1 teaspoon butter. 1 tablespoon each of cocoa and vanilla.
Mix thoroughly, put over a vessel of hot water and stir to a smooth cream. Let cool a little before spreading on cake, or it will run.
A quick uncooked-style chocolate icing thickened over hot water rather than boiled to a sugar stage. It comes together in five minutes, and the only real skill is judging when it is cool enough to stay put.
- XXXX sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar, graded by the number of X's for fineness; XXXX (4X) is a coarser grade than the boxed sugar sold today. One cup is roughly 4 oz / 115 g, and it should be sifted before mixing to avoid lumps that will not dissolve in so little liquid.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means fresh rather than soured or cultured, not sweetened. Use heavy or whipping cream; 4 tablespoons is 1/4 cup.
- The vessel of hot waterA double boiler, or a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. The bowl should not touch the water, and the water should not boil hard, or the sugar and cocoa will set into a grainy paste.
- CocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder, not drinking chocolate. Either natural (non-alkalized) or Dutch-process will work; Dutch-process gives a darker colour and a milder flavour, and nothing here depends on the cocoa's acidity.
- That tablespoon of vanillaUnusually generous by modern habit and it also thins the filling. A teaspoon is closer to current taste; if you use the full tablespoon, expect a looser icing and allow extra cooling time.
- Cooling is the hingeThe whole recipe turns on the last sentence. Spread it warm and it will slide off the layers; let it cool until it holds a soft ribbon from the spoon, stirring once or twice so no skin forms.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough to fill a two-layer cake of 8 or 9 inches with a thin scrape left over. Double it if you want a covered top and sides.
- KeepingCream-based, so a filled cake is best eaten the day it is made and refrigerated if kept longer. The filling firms considerably when cold.
Fillings of this type — powdered sugar, a little fat, cocoa and just enough liquid to make it spreadable, warmed over water rather than boiled — spread widely once cheap, finely milled confectioners' sugar became a pantry staple in the later nineteenth century. Before that, icings generally meant beating egg white with sugar or cooking a sugar syrup to a tested stage, both fussier and less forgiving. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote in the wartime and immediate postwar years, when American cookbooks are often said to have emphasized speed, small quantities and economy of ingredients, and a filling needing four tablespoons of cream and one teaspoon of butter fits that thrift exactly.