Hi everyone and welcome to Tasting History. Today is my birthday and so I
thought it would be great to make a birthday cake, and not just any birthday
cake but a chocolate cake from Agnes Jekyll's Kitchen Essays published in
1922. Eee I thought it would be fun to try a cake that could have been served
to someone celebrating their birthday in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic
seeing as we're in quarantine in 2020 during our own pandemic, and this recipe
from 1922 is the closest I could find. We'll also take a look at the history of
birthday cakes, and why oh why we put candles on them, so get ready to make a
hundred-year-old birthday cake this time on Tasting History.
To make Agnes Jekyll's chocolate cake you'll need one cup, or 226 grams of
butter at room temperature, plus a little more for the pan, then 90 grams of flour,
225 grams of superfine sugar, 115 grams of almond flour, 225 grams of bittersweet
chocolate, 6 eggs, 1 tsp of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and 1 teaspoon of pure
vanilla extract. Now the icing for this cake is completely optional but if you
are going to make it you'll need 115 grams of powdered sugar, plus a couple
tablespoons of either cherry, or orange flavored liqueur. First pre-heat your
oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, or 175 Celsius, then butter the bottom of a 9
inch cake pan. Either a plain round cake pan or springform pan works for this.
Then line it with parchment and butter the paper and the sides of the pan as
well, then dust the inside with a little bit of flour, and a little bit of sugar
just enough to coat the insides of the pan. In a bowl combine the flour, the
almond flour, the baking powder, and the salt and whisk everything together. Then
we're gonna melt the chocolate, one of my
least favorite things to do because I
screw it up all the time. You can either melt it in the microwave,
or as Agnes Jeckle would have put it into a heat proof bowl, and set that bowl
over a pot of simmering water. This is where I tend to screw it up, if you get
even one drop of water in that bowl with the chocolate the chocolate will seize
up as soon as it melts, and there is no bringing it back through anything less
than pure alchemy. So make sure that bowl is dry. Once the chocolate is melted set
it aside to cool, then it's time to separate the eggs, another one of my less
favorite activities. Put the yolks into a medium bowl, then beat them briefly just
to blend, and stir in the vanilla. Put the egg whites into a large bowl and then
with either a whisk, or a handheld mixer mix on medium high until you get nice
stiff peaks. Now that the chocolate is melted and the eggs are separated you're
done with the hardest parts of this recipe, so take a moment to relax, pat
yourself on the back, hit that Like button, and have a listen to why exactly
we have birthday cake.
"Of all the days in the year the one
they celebrate the most is their birthday it is customary to have the
board furnished on that day with an ampler supply than common they eat
little solid food but abundance of dessert which is set on a table a few
dishes at a time." Now this is what Herodotus wrote of the Persians in 430
BC and frankly it sounds a lot like the way that I celebrate a birthday today,
with a lot of food and a lot of dessert, but exactly what were those Persian
desserts? Well we don't know but they probably weren't cake or at least
nothing like we would call cake today. For that we've gotta visit ancient Rome.
In ancient Rome if you were male, sorry ladies, and were rich (Oh count me out ) and
had political power and were turning 50 not quite there yet
then you got a birthday cake. Now this was probably a yeasted cake of nuts and
honey, and would not be recognized by the greater cake societies of today but it
was in the strictest of terms the first birthday cake, but seeing as like 99% of
the population didn't get one I'm curious when does a pleb like me get a
birthday cake. For that we looked to the Germans. In 15th century Germany, bakeries
saw the celebratory potential and the financial benefit of selling cakes on
people's birthdays. These were dense small single layer cakes with very
little sugar because the ingredient was so expensive then, but if you had any
money at all they became a must on your birthday. Now the cake we're making today
is also a single layer cake, but it isn't dense ,it isn't small and it definitely
doesn't skimp on the sugar. So now it's time to take that sugar, and put it into
a bowl with the butter, and cream them together until nice and fluffy. You can
use a stand mixer or a handheld mixer or a wooden spoon just like Agnes Jeckle
would have done. I was thinking of actually trying it with a wooden spoon,
but then I thought you know what it's my birthday and I don't have to. Once the
butter and sugar mixture is nice and fluffy add in your melted chocolate, and
beat until well mixed then take a spoonful of the flour
mixture, and mix that in as well that's going to stop the eggs from curdling
when we put them in. Which we're about to do, so add in your egg yolk mixture first,
and beat those in then add in the rest of the flour
mixture. Now this should be done by hand because you don't want to overwork the
flour, or else you're gonna get a tough cake. Once the flour is incorporated take
a quarter of the egg whites and fold them in gradually. This definitely needs
to be done by hand or else you're going to knock out the air, and you won't get a
nice rise to the cake. Once no streaks remain fold in the remaining egg whites
the same way, then spoon the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top now
it's time to put the cake in the oven, but hold on because what we're gonna do
to the oven is a little unorthodox. In Agnes Jekyll's original recipe she calls
for the cake to be baked in a slack oven, so what is a slack oven? A slack oven is
actually a cooling oven so in the days before modern ovens you would heat the
oven to its top temperature using either coal, or wood and then bake the day's
bread at that high heat. The bread needed the high heat to rise properly then as
the oven cooled down you can make things like puddings, or pies, or crackers, or
cakes. So we put the cake in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit but as soon as
you close that door turn the oven down to 250 or 120 degrees Celsius. It makes
it so instead of 30 or 40 minutes in the oven you're gonna leave it in there for
between an hour and 15 minutes, and an hour and a half so that gives us plenty
of time to head back to ancient Greece and find out why exactly we put candles
on birthday cakes.
Now in ancient Greece if you were about to pray to Artemis, but
you wanted that prayer to go to the front of the line you better get your
butt down to the temple with a cake, and a candle because in
addition to her vast goddess resume Artemis was the goddess of the moon so a
lit candle would make that round cake glow like the moon. Then once the flame
went out, the smoke would carry your prayer up to the lady herself. Now if you
want your candles specifically for birthday cakes you've got to go back to
Germany where the birthday cake craze hit its peak in the early 18th century
with kinderfest. Kinderfest, or child party, was the beginning of children's
birthday parties. The morning of your kid's birthday you take out the cake and
put a candle in for each year that they were alive, plus one more in
the hopes that they make it to their next birthday, how bleak. Throughout the
day the family would keep the candles burning switching them out as needed,
because it was thought that the flames kept bad spirits away, and it was thought
that evil spirits had higher accessibility to a person on their
birthday, but once dinner had passed I guess all
the spirits lost their power, and the kid could blow out the candles and eat his
dessert. Now I'm not a child so I wouldn't have been part of that cake
tradition, but adults were about to get in on that candle covered cake
convention when in 1746 Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf celebrated his birthday
with a cake as large as any oven could be found to bake it ,and holes made in
the cake according to the years of the person's age everyone having a candle
stuck into it, and one in the middle it said that the cake was in the shape of a
giant L, and he had two foot tall letters sticking out of it to spell out the name
Ludwig. I want that for me and my name is only three letters, but again I probably
would not get that because I am NOT a German Count, instead I'll have to wait
until the Industrial Revolution makes it so ingredients are cheap enough for
everyone to get a birthday cake. Now just like Count Zinzendorf, people loved to
have writing on their cakes albeit not two-foot tall letters. Now the cake
probably wouldn't have said happy birthday because that phrase didn't
become popular until the song was recorded in 1912, instead you would have
had something like many happy returns of the day. Not quite as pithy but it works.
It was the Victorian age that also brought us the convention of colored
icing on cakes often made red with beet juice, or green
with parsley and that's why I'm choosing white icing which is what's called for
in this recipe. Now after about an hour and 15 minutes the cake should be ready
to take out of the oven. The cake will either pull away from the sides of the
pan, or if you stick a wooden skewer in the middle it should come out clean. Take
the cake out of the oven, and set on a wire rack allowing to cool in the pan
completely. Once cooled take it out of the pan and remove the parchment. At this
point it's either ready to eat uniced, or time to make the icing. For that all
you have to do is take your confectioner sugar, and whisk it with the liqueur
until smooth then spread across the top of the cake. Then we light the candles, wish
ourselves a happy quarantine birthday blow 'em out, and cut our cake. Now let's
see how this hundred-year-old cake tastes. Hm Hm, very chocolatey which I
love. Delicious, light, not too dense, kudos. Thank You Agnes Jeklyll for a
wonderful birthday cake. Now please look away while I intend to eat this entire
thing by myself, and I will see you next time on Tasting History,