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Layer-Cakes (Water half cake chocolate boil)
water, half cake chocolate; boil twenty minutes (or until thick enough), and pour over cakes while warm, piling the layers one upon the other. For frosting for top of cake, take whites of two eggs, one and a half cups sugar, tea-spoon vanilla, three heaping teaspoons grated chocolate. -Mrs. Ella Snider, Minneapolis, Minn.
The page begins mid-sentence: what survives is the chocolate boiled filling for a layer cake and a separate uncooked frosting for the top. Treat it as two components to add to a cake you already have.
- The missing first lineThe missing first line almost certainly began with sugar and water in some proportion. Since the quantities are cut off, do not guess at them blind; use the boiled-chocolate filling from a complete period or modern recipe and take the technique here as confirmation of it.
- "Half cake chocolate"Nineteenth-century chocolate was sold in solid cakes, usually unsweetened; sizes varied by maker, and half-pound blocks scored into squares were one common form. "Half a cake" is genuinely ambiguous — depending on the maker it could mean anywhere from about 2 to 4 oz. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not chips or Dutch cocoa, and start at the low end since the syrup carries all the sugar.
- Twenty minutes is a stage, not a timeThe parenthesis "or until thick enough" is the real instruction. What is happening is a sugar syrup cooking into the fudge range, roughly 235–240F on a thermometer. Twenty minutes on a wood range is not twenty minutes on gas or induction, and if it is taken much further the filling will set hard and may crack when the layers are stacked.
- Pour while warmThis filling sets as it cools, so the layers must be assembled fast. Have the cake rounds out, level and within reach before the pan comes off the heat; once it stiffens in the pan it cannot be spread without tearing the crumb.
- The top frosting is uncookedTwo whites to a cup and a half of sugar, beaten stiff, is an uncooked meringue-type icing — the sugar is never dissolved in hot syrup. Because it is never heated, use pasteurized egg whites, and keep the finished cake refrigerated and away from anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Consistency of the frostingThat ratio of sugar to white gives a very stiff paste. Add the sugar gradually to whites already beaten to soft peaks, and thin with a few drops of water or lemon juice if it stops spreading. The three heaping teaspoons of grated chocolate should be finely grated, or it will streak and drag.
- YieldThe frosting as given would cover the top of an 8- or 9-inch cake; the amount of filling cannot be judged, since its measurements are cut off.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) belongs to the great wave of American compiled cookbooks in which named contributors — here Mrs. Ella Snider of Minneapolis, a long way from Dixie — sent in their own recipes. The layer cake itself was a fairly new thing: it depended on cheap chemical leavening and on tin layer pans, both widely available only after mid-century. Chocolate fillings like this one were made easier by the same convenience, since American firms were by then selling unsweetened chocolate in scored cakes that a home cook could break and grate without roasting or grinding beans herself. The two-part finish — a cooked, fudge-like filling between the layers and a raw beaten-egg icing on top — turns up in other books of the period, the cooked syrup being wanted for its ability to set and hold layers together, and the meringue for a white or pale surface that showed off the cake.