My wife found me a new stack of old recipe books a few weeks ago. She’s been going through them looking for ideas, and the first one she came up with is out of the Ohio State Grange Cook Book, Eleventh Edition, 1949.
I like all the oddball recipes she’s finding. But what really tickles my funny bone is every ten minutes or so when she asks, “What the hell is a quick oven? And ‘Bake in two layers’ … at what temperature and for how long?!”
Welcome to my world, sweetie! 
So here’s our first entry from this new batch.
It’s almost more of a ganache, so I had a little trouble spreading it on. But that’s entirely my fault. Two or three more rounds of practice and I’m sure I could use this one just fine.
Unless you’re really confident in your frosting skills though, I’d suggest you not use this one for the first time if you want the cake to look perfect.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons softened butter
1 whole egg (see note below)
¼ teaspoon salt
1 square melted chocolate (see note below)
½ teaspoon vanilla
2 cups powdered sugar
cream as necessary
Directions
Wait until your cake has cooled before making this frosting. It will set up and start getting a crust on it fairly quickly, so you want to start spreading it as soon as it’s mixed.
Combine the egg, butter, chocolate and salt.
The butter and chocolate should both be warm enough to press a fork through without any resistance. You can warm them up in the microwave, just be very careful that you don’t liquefy the butter or scorch the chocolate.
ALTERNATIVES:
- In place of the whole egg you can use two yolks.
- In place of the baking chocolate you can use 3 tablespoons cocoa powder and 1 more tablespoon softened butter.
HEALTH NOTE: The egg(s) in this recipe won’t be cooked. If you have medical issues or just don’t like the idea of raw eggs, try substituting a 2-inch piece of banana for the egg. The flavor will barely be noticeable.
Beat the ingredients together until smooth.
Add the powdered sugar and vanilla and beat until smooth again.
You want the frosting to be spreadable but not runny. Add cream or milk a teaspoon at a time and mixing it in until you get to the right consistency.
I added about a tablespoon to start, and that was a bit much. I was able to pour it on like a ganache, then spread it on the sides as it thickened up. Yes, it was thickening up before it flowed all the way down to the plate. I told you to wait until the cake was cooled before making this recipe.
One last option: You could hit this with a mixer and whip it before spreading on the cake.
And that’s it.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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6 Comments
Drew, I bet that the reason it ended up so soft is the super-humongous size of our eggs nowadays! This looks a LOT like my mom’s famous chocolate mocha “buttercream” (it’s not a standard one). I can’t tell you the exact differences, because I still don’t have that recipe.
But I’ve watched her make it.
Linda, that’s the one piece of the recipe I hadn’t thought about. Which is dumb, because it’s the only part that wasn’t measured.
Doing this again, I’d use less milk than I started with, or add more powdered sugar. Or do what someone else suggested and whip it first. That would make it fluffy and spreadable, and it would still set up the way I like. (I can’t stand whipped frosting that stays soft forever.)
One of my favorite inventions when making a cake is after the layers have cooled for a little on the racks, wrap them in plastic wrap–the cake comes out soooooooo moist–and it seems like what you’d want for this recipe since it has to wait around awhile for the frosting.
Regarding the odd instructions here and there–we got a huge kick out of reading the “How Men Cook” section of my River Road Recipes (Baton Rouge Junior League), recently, including this gem in “Cooking Game with a Brown Gravy”
“Some cooks even add prepared gravy mixes to the above, but this only proves that they don’t know how to cook.”
Reminds me of a chili recipe I saw. At the end it said if you weren’t happy with it, add a can of Dinty Moore chili … And another … And another … Until it tasted good. I thought, “Then why not just start with the Dinty Moore?”
Jenny, good idea with the plastic wrap… I baked my mom’s “hot milk cake” and didn’t have time to frost it the same day, so as soon as it was cool enough, I wrapped it … well, when I got around to unwrapping for the frosting, the edges, which are normally a littly “crusty,” were soft and the whole layer just seemed a lot nicer and less crumbly. I thought it could be my imagination!