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Calumet Chocolate Cake
1/3 cup butter 3/4 cup sugar 3 teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/6 teaspoon salt 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup milk 2 eggs Cream butter, add sugar, then well beaten eggs yolks. Mix and sift dry ingredients and add alternately with milk to first mixture. "Fold in" beaten egg whites. One half teaspoon of vanilla may be added. Pour into greased tins and bake in a moderate oven 30 minutes. (See illustration, page 62.) Chocolate Filling 2½ cups powdered sugar, 1/2 teaspoon melted butter in one tablespoon hot water. 3 tablespoons cocoa. Cream to make a mixture that will spread. Mix sugar and cocoa. Add hot water and butter, then sufficient cream to make of a consistency that will spread.
A standard creamed butter cake from a baking powder company's promotional book, printed with the top of its ingredient list lost — the butter and sugar amounts are simply not on the page. The method is sound and familiar, so a competent baker can work from the proportions that survive.
- The missing quantitiesButter and sugar are absent from the list, though the method calls for both. For 2 cups flour, 2 eggs and 1 cup milk, the conventional figures in books of this era are 1/2 cup butter and 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar. That is an inference from the surviving proportions, not a reading of the original.
- Where is the chocolateThere is none in the cake itself. The title refers to the chocolate filling; the cake is a plain white-and-yellow layer. If you want a chocolate cake, this is not the batter for it.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was sold as a double-acting powder, so 3 teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder is a reasonable substitution. Three teaspoons for 2 cups flour is on the generous side by current standards; 2 to 2 1/2 gives a less soapy crumb.
- 1/6 teaspoon saltAn odd measure, possibly left over from scaling a larger formula, though nothing on the page says so. Read it as a scant quarter teaspoon and move on.
- A moderate oven350F. Thirty minutes suits two 8- or 9-inch layers; a single deeper tin will need 35 to 45 minutes. Test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Greased tinsLine the bases with parchment as well; modern nonstick still releases a tender butter cake more reliably with paper.
- Folding the whitesThe whites are the only lift beyond the powder, so beat them to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold in two additions with a spatula. Stirring them in flattens the batter and you lose the point of separating the eggs.
- The fillingThis is an uncooked cocoa fondant-style icing: powdered sugar, cocoa, melted butter in hot water, then cream to loosen. Add the cream a teaspoon at a time — it goes from stiff to running off the cake very quickly. Sift the sugar and cocoa together or you will be chasing lumps.
- YieldTwo 8-inch layers, 10 to 12 slices.
Reliable Recipes was a Calumet Baking Powder booklet, one of hundreds of branded cookbooks that American food manufacturers gave away in the early twentieth century to teach housewives a method that happened to require their product. Calumet, founded in Chicago in 1889, made a double-acting phosphate powder that reacted once in the bowl and again in the oven's heat. Titling a plain butter cake a "chocolate cake" on the strength of its filling was ordinary practice then, and the mahogany-crumbed devil's food that would eventually displace this style is generally thought to have spread through American recipe collections only later.