Home › Cakes › For Chocolate Frosting
For Chocolate Frosting
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco chocolate 2 squares melted bitter 2 cupfuls powdered sugar 6 tablespoonfuls coffee 1/4 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract For cake. Cream Crisco; add sugar gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, milk, flour, salt, baking powder, grated chocolate, citron, and raisins. Mix and beat two minutes, then fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Turn into Criscoed and floured tin and bake for one and a quarter hours in a moderate oven.
For chocolate frosting.
When cold cover with frosting.
Knead Crisco into sugar. Melt chocolate, add coffee, sugar, salt, and Crisco, and stir until thick, then add vanilla Cakes and put away to cool. When cold spread on cake. This frosting may be used any time. It is just as good made one day and used the next by adding a little more hot coffee. It is always soft, creamy and delicious. Sufficient for one cake.
The page as printed has collided with the cake recipe above it: the ingredient list runs the two together and the cake's quantities are missing entirely. What survives intact is the frosting, which is workable as written.
- What the frosting actually needs2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 squares (2 oz) melted unsweetened chocolate, 2 cups powdered sugar, 6 tablespoons coffee, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla. The rest of the line belongs to the cake.
- The cake is unusableIts method calls for eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, grated chocolate, citron and raisins with no amounts given. Bake a chocolate fruit cake you already trust and use this frosting on it.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening. The modern product has been reformulated to cut trans fats but behaves much the same in a frosting; unsalted butter works and tastes better, though it firms up harder in the refrigerator.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, still sold in scored bars. "Bitter" here means unsweetened, not bittersweet, which would make the frosting cloying against 2 cups of sugar.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar, sifted. Period books sometimes used "powdered" for a fine granulated sugar, but the kneading-into-the-shortening step works best with the modern cornstarch-cut powdered kind.
- CoffeeBrewed coffee, hot, not grounds or instant powder. It is the only liquid in the recipe and it is doing the work of cutting the chocolate's bitterness.
- The hingeStir until the mixture visibly thickens, then cool completely before spreading. Spread while warm and it slides off the cake; the recipe is explicit about putting it away to cool for good reason.
- Reviving itThe claim that it keeps to the next day holds up. Beat in hot coffee a teaspoon at a time until it loosens back to a spreadable cream.
- YieldThe book says only "sufficient for one cake" -- in practice about enough for the top and sides of an 8- or 9-inch layer cake, or the top of a single loaf or tube cake.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book's job was to prove that a cottonseed-oil fat could stand in for butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen, which is why the brand name appears not just as an ingredient but as a verb -- pans are "Criscoed and floured." A cooked frosting thickened with shortening rather than butter is exactly the sort of demonstration the volume was built around, and its selling point, that it stays "always soft, creamy and delicious" for a day or more, was a genuine advantage of a fat that does not set as firmly as butter does.