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Chocolate Cream Filling
Put one and one-fourth squares unsweetened chocolate in a saucepan and melt over hot water. Add to Cream Filling, using in making one cup sugar in place of seveneighths cup.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you are already making the book's Cream Filling, a flour-thickened pastry cream cooked in a double boiler. Read both together before starting.
- What a "square" isA square of chocolate is one ounce, so this calls for 1 1/4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped. Modern unsweetened bars are usually marked in ounces on the wrapper, though the scored portions may be half an ounce rather than a full ounce, so weigh rather than count.
- The sugar changeSeven-eighths cup is 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Raising it to a full cup compensates for the bitterness of unsweetened chocolate; do not skip the adjustment or the filling will taste flat and harsh.
- Melt over hot water, not on the burnerUnsweetened chocolate has no sugar or added fat to protect it and scorches quickly over direct heat. A bowl set over barely simmering water, or short bursts in a microwave with stirring between, keeps it smooth.
- The hinge: cook the flour outThe parent Cream Filling is a flour-thickened, egg-enriched custard; check the original for the exact method. Cook it until it has thickened and the raw flour taste is gone, stirring constantly. Pulled early it tastes pasty.
- Adding the chocolateStir the melted chocolate into the hot finished filling until no streaks remain, then strain if it looks at all grainy. Adding chocolate to a cold filling gives you hard flecks rather than a smooth cream.
- Preventing a skinPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface while it cools; a skin stirred back in later leaves lumps.
- Yield and useThe standard Cream Filling makes a modest amount, enough to fill cake layers or a batch of cream puffs or eclairs; check the parent recipe for quantities. Keep it refrigerated and use within two or three days.
Fannie Farmer's cake chapter appears to be organized much the way a professional kitchen thinks: one mother recipe with a run of short variations hung off it, so Chocolate Cream Filling is barely three lines long because everything that matters was printed a page earlier. The filling itself is a flour-based pastry cream, more forgiving than the cornstarch or all-egg versions that later became standard, and it is often said to belong to a moment when American home baking shifted from sturdy fruit-and-spice cakes to layer cakes built around a soft filling. Unsweetened chocolate in one-ounce squares was the ordinary household form throughout the late nineteenth century, sold in cakes by firms such as Baker's, and recipes of the period habitually count it in squares rather than ounces because that is how it came off the shelf. The instruction to melt it over hot water reflects a period when stove heat was hard to moderate and a double boiler was the standard defense against scorching.