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Chocolate Nougat Cake
1½ cups powdered sugar 1 egg 1 cup milk 2 cups bread flour 3 teaspoons baking powder ⅔ teaspoon vanilla 2 squares chocolate, melted 1/3 cup powdered sugar ½ cup almonds, blanched and shredded Cream the butter, add gradually one and one-half cups sugar, and egg unbeaten when well mixed, add two-thirds , and egg unbeaten; when well mixed, add two-thirds milk, flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and vanilla. To melted chocolate add one-third cup powdered sugar, place on range, add gradually remaining milk, and cook until smooth. Cool slightly, and add to cake mixture. Bake fifteen to twenty minutes in round layer cake pans. Put between layers and on top of cake White Mountain Cream sprinkled with almonds.
The ingredient list as printed has been garbled by the typesetter — the butter is called for in the method but never quantified, and a phrase is duplicated. Read the method, not the list, and note the points below before starting.
- The missing butterThe instructions begin "Cream the butter" but no quantity survives in the list. For a two-layer cake of this size in this book, ½ cup (1 stick, 4 oz) is the standard amount and is what the flour, milk and egg proportions expect.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn Farmer's usage powdered sugar is a fine-grained granulated sugar, roughly today's caster or superfine. Ordinary granulated works; modern powdered sugar contains cornstarch and will throw the texture off.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Two squares is 2 oz — bitter, not sweet, which is why a third of a cup of sugar is cooked into it separately.
- The chocolate paste is the hingeMelt the chocolate, beat in the 1/3 cup sugar, then add the reserved third of the milk gradually over heat and cook to a smooth glossy paste. Let it cool to warm before adding it to the batter: lumpy or very hot, it risks softening the creamed butter and streaking the crumb.
- Bread flourPeriod bread flour was likely somewhat lower in protein than today's high-protein bread flour, though the two are not directly comparable. All-purpose works; for a finer crumb, replace 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Layers this thin suit a moderate oven, roughly 350-375°F; start checking at fifteen minutes.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the heavy side by modern standards; the tartrate powders of the period were single-acting and released much of their gas before the pan reached the oven. Two teaspoons is closer to a modern lift.
- The frostingWhite Mountain Cream is the book's boiled frosting — a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white. Use pasteurized whites if that matters to you, and pour the syrup in a thin steady thread while beating.
- YieldTwo 8- or 9-inch layers, serving eight to ten. Blanch and shred the almonds while the layers bake; they are scattered over the frosting, not folded in.
Nougat here means almonds, not the chewy confection: nineteenth-century American cake names borrowed freely from the confectioner's vocabulary, so a cake finished with boiled white frosting and shredded blanched almonds became a nougat cake, and adding melted chocolate to the batter made it a chocolate one. Boston and Dorchester were centers of the American chocolate trade, and Farmer's book is thick with cakes, fillings and frostings built on "squares" of it. The technique of cooking the chocolate with sugar and milk into a smooth paste before it meets the batter is characteristic of the period and does real work: it disperses the cocoa solids and deepens the color.