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Maple Layer Cake--Donald Fudge
1-3 cake chocolate. 2 cups maple sugar. 1/2 cup butter. 2 1/2 cups flour. 1 teaspoon soda. 2 eggs. 1 cup buttermilk.
Melt chocolate over hot water. Dissolve soda in buttermilk; cream butter and sugar; add eggs, milk and flour; mix well; fold in melted chocolate last. Bake in two layers.
A plain buttermilk-and-soda layer cake sweetened entirely with maple sugar. The instructions assume a cook who already knows her pans and her oven, so the two things most needed here are a temperature and a tin size.
- The chocolate measure"1-3 cake chocolate" reads as one-third of a cake of unsweetened baking chocolate. If the cake is the one-ounce size often met with in period recipes, that is about a third of an ounce, grated fine -- more of a colouring and flavour note than a chocolate cake. If you want it to read as chocolate, that is a different cake.
- Maple sugarTwo cups of hard maple sugar means the pressed cake sugar, grated or pounded before creaming; it will not cream with butter in lumps. Granulated maple sugar can be substituted cup for cup.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not name an oven at all. As a modern starting point, 350F for 25 to 30 minutes in two greased 8- or 9-inch layer tins. The layers are done when they spring back and the edges pull from the tin.
- Order of mixing"Add eggs, milk and flour" can be taken as alternating the buttermilk and flour into the creamed butter and sugar in two or three additions, beginning and ending with flour, though the recipe does not say so.
- The sodaOne teaspoon of soda to one cup of buttermilk is the whole leavening there is no baking powder here. Dissolve it in the buttermilk as directed and get the batter into the tins promptly; the reaction begins at once.
- What is missingNo salt and no vanilla. A half teaspoon of salt with the flour is worth adding; maple carries its own flavour and needs no extract.
- YieldTwo layers, twelve to sixteen slices.
Maple sugar was one of the standard cane-sugar substitutes urged on American households: domestically produced, plentiful in the Northeast, and often said to be less exposed to shipping and rationing pressures. Buttermilk and soda as the sole leavening is older still: it predates reliable commercial baking powder and survived in home baking long after, partly from habit and partly for the character the acid gives the crumb. The fragmentary chocolate measure, one-third of a cake, is a reminder that baking chocolate was sold in scored blocks meant to be broken down.