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Finest Chocolate Cake
Melt 4 ounces of common chocolate by merely warming it in a cup set on the side of the range.
Make the snow cake mixture preceding, flavor it strongly with vanilla, and leave out the brandy. Pour in the melted chocolate and beat it in just before the milk.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone formula: it modifies the snow cake batter printed just above it in the book. Read that recipe first, since all the quantities of butter, sugar, flour, milk and egg white come from there.
- "Common chocolate"In a book of this period this most likely means plain unsweetened cooking chocolate, sold in cakes and used for baking rather than eating. Use 4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate; if you substitute bittersweet, the cake will be noticeably sweeter and the batter looser.
- Warming, not cookingSetting the cup on the cool side of the range is a stand-in for a low water bath. Melt over barely simmering water or in short bursts in the microwave, stirring, and keep it under about 115F so the chocolate stays fluid and does not seize or scorch.
- Temper before it goes inThe chocolate must still be liquid and only warm when it hits the batter. Poured in hot it melts the butter and the aeration collapses; added cold it sets into shot and streaks. Warm the mixing bowl slightly in cold weather.
- Why before the milkThe instruction to beat it in just before the milk matters. Chocolate thickens a creamed butter-and-sugar batter considerably, and the milk that follows brings it back to a droppable consistency.
- Vanilla and the missing brandy"strongly" implies more vanilla than the snow cake would otherwise take; a couple of teaspoons of extract in a layer batter is a reasonable modern reading. The recipe gives no reason for dropping the brandy; leaving it in is not dangerous.
- OvenThe original gives no baking instruction here; follow the snow cake recipe above. As a modern default, 350F: two 8-inch layers 25-30 minutes, a loaf or tube pan 40-50. Test with a skewer, since the dark crumb hides the usual colour cues.
- Folding the whitesThe name "snow cake" is generally taken to refer to its stiffly beaten egg whites, though many versions also use chemical leavening. Fold them in last, by hand, and get the cake into a preheated oven immediately.
- YieldThe original gives none, and it depends on the snow cake recipe above; batters of this kind commonly fill two 8- or 9-inch layers.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working hotel and restaurant cooks, which is why so many of his entries are single-paragraph amendments to a formula on the page above rather than complete recipes. That chocolate appears here as a variation on a white butter cake reflects where American chocolate cake stood at the end of the nineteenth century: chocolate was still primarily a beverage and a coating, and cakes that were chocolate all the way through were a relatively new idea. "Snow cake" belongs to the large family of egg-white cakes -- silver cake, white mountain, lady cake -- and a baker with a batch of yolks going into custards would have whites to spend. The result here is a crossing of the two fashions, and the brandy is omitted.