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Chocolate Sponge
1 teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon clove 1/2 cup cold water 1 cup flour 1/4 cup prepared powdered cocoa 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter; add cocoa, yolks of eggs well beaten, sugar mixed with cinnamon and clove, and water. Beat the whites of eggs, and add to first mixture alternately with flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Bake in small tins from fifteen to twenty minutes. 1/2 cup butter 2 cups sugar Yolks 4 eggs 1 cup milk 2⅔ cups flour Devil's Food Cake I 5 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Whites 4 egg's 4 squares chocolate 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, and add gradually one-half the sugar. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemoncolored, and add gradually remaining sugar. Combine mixtures, and add alternately milk and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder and salt; then add whites of eggs beaten stiff, chocolate melted, and vanilla. Bake fortyfive to fifty minutes in an angel cake pan. Cover with White Mountain Cream (see p. 528).
A small spiced chocolate cake baked in individual tins, from the era when powdered cocoa had just become a cheap pantry staple. The batter is a butter cake lightened with beaten whites, despite the name.
- The butter is unmeasuredThe method opens with "cream the butter," but no quantity appears in the ingredient list for this cake. (The "1/2 cup butter" printed further down belongs to the Devil's Food Cake I list, which has been run together with this one.) Treat the amount as unrecorded rather than guessing precisely.
- Prepared powdered cocoaThis means plain unsweetened cocoa powder, sold ready-ground and defatted, as distinct from the block chocolate used elsewhere in the chapter. Either natural or Dutch-process works; do not substitute a sweetened drinking mix.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For small tins baking fifteen to twenty minutes, 350-375F is a reasonable working range.
- Small tinsIndividual patty or gem pans, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup. Yield will depend on tin size; test with a skewer at fifteen minutes.
- Leavening is heavy by modern measureThree teaspoons of baking powder to one cup of flour is roughly three times current practice. A modern powder at this rate is likely to give a coarse crumb and a detectable chemical aftertaste; reducing it is worth considering.
- Adding the whitesThe instruction to add beaten whites alternately with the flour means folding, not beating. Once the whites go in, work quickly and get the tins into the oven, since chemical leavening plus air is all that holds the crumb up.
- Clove quantityThe clove measure was checked against the printed page: it is a quarter teaspoon, against the full teaspoon of cinnamon.
Cocoa powder in tins was one of the great grocery novelties of the 1880s and 1890s: the Dutch press method had made defatted, easily dissolved cocoa cheap, and American manufacturers pushed it hard with recipe booklets. Cookbooks of the period responded by adding a run of cocoa and chocolate cakes to chapters that a generation earlier had offered only pound cake, sponge and fruit cake. The name here is loose -- a true sponge contains no butter and relies on eggs alone, while this is a creamed butter cake with whites folded in, and the cinnamon and clove mark it as a descendant of the older spice cakes rather than anything newly invented. Pairing warm spice with chocolate is often said to have been a nineteenth-century habit, and reads as old-fashioned now only because mid-twentieth-century American chocolate cake settled on vanilla as its sole aromatic.