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Chocolate Marshmallow Cake
Follow receipe for Chocolate Cake II. As soon as cake is removed from pan, cover bottom with marshmallows pulled apart with tips of fingers, but not quite separated into halves.
The exposed soft surface will quickly adhere to hot cake. Pour over Chocolate Fudge Frosting. ¼ cup butter
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: it depends on two other entries in the book, a chocolate layer cake and a cooked fudge frosting. The whole trick is heat management.
- The hinge: work while the cake is hotThe marshmallows are torn open so the sticky interior meets the cake and welds itself in place. Turn the cake out and cover it within a minute or two; on a cooled cake the pieces slide loose under the frosting.
- "Cover bottom"Most likely the surface that sat on the bottom of the pan, which is flat and even, though the recipe does not spell this out. Read that way, the cake is turned so that face is up, dressed, and the frosting poured over the marshmallow layer.
- Marshmallows then and nowPeriod marshmallows are generally described as softer than today's shelf-stable ones, though the recipe gives no indication of size or type. Standard supermarket marshmallows torn in half work; a bag of about 10 oz is more than enough for a 9-inch layer, and the mini variety melts flat rather than staying pillowy.
- Frosting temperatureCooked fudge frosting should be poured while still fluid enough to level itself but not scalding, or it will dissolve the marshmallows into a puddle. Beat it only until it loses its gloss, then pour immediately.
- If you want a set topA few minutes under the broiler, watched constantly, will brown the marshmallows before the frosting goes on. This is not in the original and is offered only as an option.
- ServingThe yield depends on Chocolate Cake II, which is not reproduced here; a single 8- or 9-inch layer would give roughly six to eight portions. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between slices, or the marshmallow drags.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book grew by accretion through its many editions, and short cross-referenced entries like this one show how new commercial products were folded into an existing repertoire. Marshmallow candy shifted from a pharmacist's confection made with the mucilage of the marsh mallow root to a mass-produced gelatin-and-sugar sweet during the later nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth it is generally said to have become cheap, uniform and widely sold. Cookbooks of the period responded by treating it as an ingredient rather than a sweet, scattering it over cakes, folding it into fudge and floating it on cocoa. The instruction to tear each piece open with the fingertips rather than cut it is a candy-maker's touch: the torn surface is tacky in a way a knifed one is not.