Caramel Devil's Food Cake
A very old cookbook & the start of a new series!
Dating is bankrupting me. I have probably spent around $500 on dates in the last two months — and since I’m gay, that’s accounting for splitting the bill every time! (Also, since I don’t eat out that often, this is a big unexpected expense.) It’s a good thing, I guess, since this is the most I’ve dated in my whole life, and my future 1-bedroom apartment isn’t going to pay for itself!
The overall setup of one or two glasses at a natural wine bar on a weeknight is just too easy to pull off at this point. Plus, it provides a clean break and getaway if you didn’t enjoy yourself — or worse, if you did. But there has to be a better way.
So we’re going full analog for these next few weeks: meetup in the park for … a glass of fucking water! Because I’m not setting any more money on fire for first dates that might never turn into seconds. That being said, if you have more affordable first date ideas, lay them on me!
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Social Media : @aaron_jzart’s Calligraphy on TikTok
It may seem hard to believe, but I was once a precocious child who cycled through tons of silly little artsy hobbies. One of them was calligraphy, the visual art of beautiful writing. I would dutifully practice in my notebook, with my many sets of colored specialty pens and markers, each letter of the alphabet in gothic or script fonts. Anyway, it certainly didn’t help my handwriting, which still sucks, but this TikTok account reminded me of how relaxing and fulfilling I once found the practice. While I’m not scrolling on that app much anymore, I have zoned out a few times watching the lives where he just…. writes the names people request in the chat. It’s wonderful.
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Recipe 🍽️ : Make a Cheeseburger Focaccia
This recipe and the accompanying variation from Erin at Cloudy Kitchen absolutely slaps.
Playlist 🎧: June 2024
I haven’t shared my monthly playlist in a while (yes, I make one for every month, and you can see what I’m listening to on my Spotify if you even care.)
This Week’s Recipe: Vintage Cookbook Club!
This project is a long time coming! Around five years ago, when I was really starting to bake with a fervor, my dad gifted me this small, thin cookbook, which belonged to his mother, Dorothy. Her high school home economics teacher, Miss Metler, had given it to her for Christmas. I would have called this the Antique Cookbook Club, but antiques apparently have to be at least 100 years old, and this one is only about 90 years old.
All About Home Baking was published in 1933 by General Foods Corporation, which had been previously known as the Postum Cereal Company, as in the Post brand cereals we have today. At the time it was published, the company owned brands like Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee. And as you’ll see in the recipes we’re going to explore in this series, they also owned Swan’s Down Cake Flour, Baker’s Chocolate and Calumet Baking Powder — ingredients they feature a lot.
After coming into vogue in the late 19th Century, this type of advertising cookbook was common as companies could send out, for free or for a low fee, booklets with minimal photos and illustrations to market their products. (Fortunately, this book does include some vintage photos that are very, very cool.) Some of the recipes we’ll see definitely seem dated to our modern eyes, but even though trends come and go, the real surprise from this book wasn’t how different the recipes are — but instead, how much of baking has remained the same for nearly 100 years. This book was published nearly 40 years after Fannie Farmer introduced standardized volume measures to Americans in her book The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (and unlike the rest of the world, most Americans still use them instead of the more specific weight measures.)
This is the recipe we’re tackling this week: Caramel Devil’s Food Cake. Of course it jumped out because of my pretty clear obsession with caramel and chocolate (in fact, next week’s paid-subscriber recipe also features caramel and chocolate). My dad, who grew up eating some of the recipes in this book, remembered how his mom made the frosting. “She had a method of testing when it was done,” he told me via text. “Didn’t have a candy thermometer but she would let some drip off a wooden spoon into a cup of water.” Of course, he remembers right: it’s the way the book suggests to test the sugar concentration in candy making. The book says cook to 232°F for soft-ball stage but sources today say 235-240°F. Since I only cooked it to 232°F on my instant read thermometer, I now wonder if I should have let it go longer.
This frosting is very sweet, and despite my best efforts at constantly stirring, it went a little gritty. I’m pretty sure there’s no avoiding that since it requires boiling milk and 3 cups of sugar together for a loooong time. I ended up using an extra four tablespoons of butter to take some of the sugary edge off and give it more fluffy body since it basically goes on very slack even after chilling and beating well. (By the way, I actually loved the way it looked after finishing frosting — it swoops better than many buttercreams and, because there’s not a lot of air in it, the glossy sheen is bubble-free and flawless.) What results is a thick frosting that hardens on the outside as it sits, but still yields way to a melt-in-your-mouth feel and a nostalgic taste and brown-sugar forward caramel flavor.
I think a recipe today would use a smaller amount of milk (or replace it with a smaller amount of cream) as well as a tablespoon or two of corn syrup to avoid some of the grittiness. If I were to make it again, I would also increase the butter to a half-cup, and definitely balance out the sweetness with ½ teaspoon kosher salt. (In addition to the fact that I used unsalted butter, back in the day, butter used to be much saltier in order to keep better.)
The cake utilizes the creaming method: beating sugar and butter, adding eggs and flavorings, and alternating beating in wet and dry ingredients in a few additions. Devil’s Food Cake is known for its deep, dark and rich chocolate flavor, but I would argue it’s hard to achieve that flavor with only about three ounces of chocolate and no cocoa powder. Of course, this book was published during the Great Depression when scarcity and high prices for raw ingredients could have made chocolate a more rationed ingredient.
However, I loved the texture of the cake. It boasted a velvety, fine crumb that stayed moist despite me slightly over-baking it (I would knock two minutes off the baking time next round.) This is thanks in part to the the use of only cake flour, which has a lower protein content and experiences less gluten development during the mixing process.
The recipe also calls for sifting the flour once, then measuring it, then sifting the flour with the baking soda three times, which is a lot. (Back in the day, flour didn’t come in super-well sealed packages, and sometimes it had bugs or other debris in it.) This definitely breaks up any lumps, aerates the flour slightly, and helps disperse the leavener evenly throughout the batter, but I don’t see a reason to do it more than once. For some recipes, I’ll sift my flour, but usually a simple whisking is enough for me. If I were to make this cake again, I would replace some of the cake flour by weight with maybe two tablespoons of Dutch-process cocoa powder (which won’t react with the baking soda) to add another level of chocolate flavor, plus an extra tablespoon or two of milk since cocoa soaks up so much moisture.
So… did we have fun? There are so many other fun kernels and time capsules and recipes in this book but I’ll save that for future editions of this series. Even when we’re done with All About Home Baking, I want to publish more deep-dives into recipes I’m interested in that I didn’t develop, whether in a cookbook or online or elsewhere. I don’t bake other folks’ recipes as often as I want to and I think this will give me a great reason to do it, while also (hopefully) being entertaining and informative for you all!
Also, if you have this book or know someone who did, I want to know! Do you have any favorite retro or vintage recipes you still reach for? Tell me about it!