Devil's Food Cake- Chocolate Cookery


The above photo is the inside cover from the Baker Chocolate Company 1929 booklet Chocolate Cookery. This is their recipe for Devil's Food Cake. The description is "Devil's Food Cake is a richer, sweeter, and more chocolaty cake than one made by simply adding chocolate to standard butter cake. Repeated tests show that devil's food cake is lighter and of finer, more feathery texture when the chocolate is melted and added to the creamed shortening, sugar, and egg mixture, than when cooked with part of liquid and sugar and then added".
Devil's Food Cake
2 cups sifted cake flour
1 teaspoon soda
1/2 cup butter or other shortening
2 cups sifted brown sugar (?)
2 eggs, beaten
6 squared Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate, melted
1 1/4 cups sweet milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Sift flour once, measure, add soda, and sift together three times. Cream butter thoroughly, add sugar gradually, and cream together until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, and beat well. Add chocolate and beat well. Add flour, alternately with milk, a small amount at a time. Beat after each addition until smooth. Add vanilla. Pour into two greased 10-inch layer pans of three 9-inch layer pans and bake in moderate over 325 degrees 30 minutes.
Some of the information in this book is: It was during the voyages of Columbus that chocolate became known to western civilization. They had found the natives had a strange but delicious drink made from an odd little bean. Columbus carried some of these beans back across the seas to Queen Isabella as a curiosity of the New World. But is was Cortez who really introduced Europe to the cocoa beans and the cup of chocolate. On his first voyage he feasted with Montezuma. Part of the banquet was a foamy drink called chocolatl. He found that the Aztecs crushed the cocoa beans, whisked the resulting liquid to a froth about the consistency of honey, flavored it with vanilla and chili, and served it cold. This drink was a favorite with royalty. Cortez carried the Aztec beans back to Spain and showed them how to make a drink from them. The acceptance of chocolate spread throughout Spain. The secrets of its manufacture were guarded but eventually Spanish monks carried both the beans and the method of using them across the border into France and Germany.

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