Home › Gingerbreads, Cookies, And Wafers › Chocolate Cakes
Chocolate Cakes
3 eggs 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar. Beat eggs until light. 3 squares unsweetened chocolate 1 cup stale bread crumbs 3 tablespoons flour Cream the butter, add sugar, combine mixtures, then add chocolate melted, bread crumbs. and flour. Spread mixture in a shallow buttered pan and bake in a slow oven. Shape with a tiny biscuit-cutter and put together in pairs with White Mountain Cream (see p. 528) between and on top. 2 eggs ½ cup powdered sugar ¾ cup flour 1/3 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon cinnamon
A crumb-based chocolate sheet that is baked thin, cut into rounds and sandwiched with boiled frosting — closer to a small filled cake than a cookie. Several quantities in the text as it stands do not line up, so read the notes before shopping.
- Missing butter quantityThe method says to cream butter with sugar, but no amount of butter appears anywhere in the ingredients. The figure is simply unrecorded here; any amount you use is a guess rather than a reconstruction.
- Chocolate squaresA square of unsweetened chocolate is 1 ounce, so three squares is 3 oz of 100% cacao baking chocolate. Melt over hot water and add it while still fluid but not hot enough to cook the eggs.
- Powdered sugarIn this book "powdered sugar" means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the correct substitute.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "slow" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 275-325F. In a shallow pan this batter will likely need something in the region of half an hour, but judge by feel: set and dry on top but not crisp, or the rounds will crumble under the cutter.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread, torn or grated, not dried packaged crumbs. They absorb moisture and give the cake its close, slightly damp texture; dry crumbs will drink too much and bake to sand.
- Cutting the roundsA "tiny biscuit-cutter" here probably means something in the region of an inch to an inch and a half, though the text does not say. Cut while the sheet is barely warm - fully cold it fractures, fully hot it drags.
- White Mountain CreamThe cross-referenced filling is a boiled-sugar frosting beaten into stiff egg white, in the Italian meringue family. Any boiled frosting or seven-minute icing serves the same purpose; it must be spread while still pliable.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of cakes stretched with stale bread crumbs, a habit inherited from nineteenth-century puddings and from a kitchen economy in which no loaf was thrown out. The crumbs do real work here beyond thrift: they hold moisture and keep a low-flour chocolate batter from turning to a brittle wafer. Unsweetened chocolate in squares was a Boston staple by this date — Baker's had been grinding cacao on the Neponset River in Dorchester since the eighteenth century — and Farmer treats it as an ordinary pantry item rather than a luxury. Pairing the cut rounds with a boiled white frosting reflects the turn-of-the-century taste for the strong contrast of dark cake against a stark white icing, the same logic that produced the layer cakes elsewhere in the book.