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Devil's Food Cake
1/4 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 1/2 squares chocolate 1/2 cup mashed potatoes 1 egg 3/8 cup milk 1 1/4 cups flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 cup nuts (chopped fine) 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract Cream shortening; add sugar, melted chocolate and mashed potatoes; mix well; beat egg separately and add yolk; add milk; add flour and baking powder which have been sifted together; beat well; add nuts, vanilla and beaten white of egg; mix thoroughly. Bake in greased shallow tin in moderate oven 25 to 35 minutes. Cover with
A small single-layer cake from a baking powder company's promotional book, notable for the half cup of mashed potato that keeps it damp. The recipe text breaks off mid-sentence at the frosting, so choose your own.
- 3/8 cup milkSix tablespoons. Measure it as 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons rather than eyeballing a three-eighths line.
- Chocolate squaresA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 1/2 squares is 2 1/2 oz. Modern bars are often scored in one-ounce pieces; weigh if yours are not.
- The potatoThe recipe says only "mashed potatoes". Plain unseasoned potato is the safe reading, since leftover buttered and salted mash would read as savoury in the finished crumb. Press it through a sieve or ricer so no lumps survive the creaming.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given in the book; 'moderate' is conventionally taken as around 350F. The batter is thick and the cake is shallow, so check at 25 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- Shallow tinAn 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pan gives the right depth for that 25 to 35 minute window. In a deeper pan the middle will still be wet when the edges have set.
- Shortening1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons. Butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- The eggOnly the yolk goes into the batter; the white is beaten separately and folded in last, along with the nuts and vanilla. Fold rather than beat at that stage or you lose what little lift the white contributes.
- Missing frostingThe page ends at "Cover with." A plain chocolate or boiled white icing is period-appropriate; the cake is sweet enough that a thin glaze suits it better than a heavy buttercream.
- YieldOne thin single layer, about eight to nine squares. Double it for a two-layer cake.
Potato in chocolate cake was a common early twentieth-century trick: cooked starch holds water, so the crumb stays moist for days without extra fat, and it stretched expensive chocolate and butter. The name "devil's food" appears in American cookbooks from around the turn of the century, generally understood as the dark counterpart to the pale angel food cake then in fashion, though who coined it is not documented. This version appears to come from one of the Royal Baking Powder Company's giveaway booklets u the leavening is specified by brand, and two full teaspoons are called for in a cake with only 1 1/4 cups of flour u though the attribution remains an inference. Whatever its origin, the effect of such books was to keep the tin in the cupboard.