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Fudge Shortcake
Bake the plain cake mixture (page 46) in muffin or cup cake pans. Serve with hot chocolate sauce (see below). Whipped cream may also be added.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it depends on two other pages of the book, a plain butter cake batter and a hot chocolate sauce. The points below cover what the cross-references leave unsaid.
- The two cross-referencesYou need a plain cake batter and a cooked chocolate sauce. Any standard vanilla cupcake batter and a hot fudge sauce made with cocoa or chocolate, sugar, butter and a little cream or milk will stand in without changing the character of the dish.
- "Cup cake pans"This means a metal muffin tin, which would generally have been greased and floured; paper liners were less common in home kitchens of this period.
- Oven temperatureThe page gives none. Plain cake batter in small tins is usually baked around 375F for 18 to 22 minutes; small cakes take a hotter oven than a loaf or layer so they set before they dry out.
- Fill two-thirdsMore than that and small cakes tend to dome and run over the tin.
- Serve the sauce genuinely hotHot chocolate sauce on warm cake is the whole point of the dish; the sauce should be thin enough to soak the crumb. If it has been standing, reheat it gently with a spoonful of milk to loosen it.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened or barely sweetened cream is right here, since the sauce carries the sugar. Add it at the table — it will collapse on contact with the hot sauce if it sits.
- YieldDepends on the quantity given on page 46, which is not reproduced here; a plain cake mixture of this kind typically fills a standard 12-cup tin.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the great free cookbooks of American publishing: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company handed it out to policyholders for decades through the first half of the twentieth century, as part of a wider campaign of health and household pamphlets sent by its agents. Its style explains the brevity of this page — the book was built around a small number of base recipes, with variations written as a sentence or two pointing back to them. "Fudge shortcake" borrows the name of the strawberry shortcake, the split-and-filled cake that had been standard American home cooking since the mid-1800s, and substitutes a hot chocolate sauce for the fruit — an easy swap once cocoa had become a cheap pantry staple.