Domecon Chocolate Cake: or, The filling is the real winner

It's hard to argue with chocolate cake.

Domecon Chocolate Cake 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour ¾ tsp baking soda 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate ¼ cup shortening ½ cup cold water 1 egg ¼ cup sour cream or buttermilk Heat oven to 350°. Cut two paper circles to fit in the bottom of 8-inch round pans. Then grease the pans. Press the circles firmly into place, then coat the tops of them with cooking spray. (This cake really wants to stick to the pan, so you want some paper on the bottom.) Place chocolate, shortening, and water in a small saucepan or a microwave-safe bowl. Cook until everything is melted. If microwaving, stop and stir every 15 seconds. (Don't worry if it looks curdled and weird when the water and melted shortening refuse to mix.) Set aside to cool until lukewarm. Sift the flour, sugar, and baking soda in a large bowl. Or, mix them with a whisk or a fork to break up any little clumps. Whisk the egg and buttermilk into the dry ingredients. When thoroughly combined, add the chocolate mixture. Pour and spread into the pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. When they're cooled, you may need to carefully cut around the edges to free the cake from the pans. When cold, put layers together with chocolate filling. Then frost with the icing of your choice. (I'm going to suggest you frost the top and then drizzle something down the sides instead of trying to spread icing over the whole thing. The cake sheds crumbs very well.). Chocolate filling: ¼ cup flour 1 cup sugar 1 egg yolk 1½ ounces unsweetened chocolate 1 cup cold milk ½ tsp vanilla Mix flour and sugar in a medium bowl, set aside. Have the egg yolk ready in another medium-sized bowl. Combine chocolate and milk in saucepan. Place over low heat, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is melted. Mix enough of this into the flour mixture to make a paste. Then return this to the pot. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Then reduce heat to a low simmer and cook until it is thick enough to hold a shape but still spreadable (about ten minutes). Scrape the bottom of the pot frequently. If it doesn't thicken, turn up the burner a little. Beat the egg yolk vigorously with a whisk. Continue beating hard while slowly spooning in about a third of the chocolate mixture, beating very hard the whole time. Then stir this back into the pot and cook for another two minutes. Remove from heat and cover with plastic wrap, pressing the wrap so it is in contact with the surface. (This prevents a skin from forming on top.) Let it cool, then add the vanilla. If the filling is too thick when it cools, stir in milk a spoonful at a time. This makes enough filling to spread between two 8 or 9-inch layers. Note: If you make the filling in a nonstick saucepan, you won't need to scrape it quite so much as you're cooking it. Unknown source (probably 1952-53)

To use cocoa powder instead of chocolate: For the cake: Add an additional 2 tablespoons of shortening to the amount already in the recipe. Heat the shortening and water together, getting them very hot instead of just warm enough to melt. Then thoroughly whisk in 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Let stand until lukewarm. (Adding the cocoa powder to very hot water and letting it steep for a few minutes brings out a lot more chocolate flavor than just stirring it in.) For the filling: Add 2 tablespoons of butter and 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the milk when you first get it into a saucepan. Stir over low or medium heat until the butter melts and the cocoa powder dissolves. Then finish the recipe as written.

I'm not going to say this was the only chocolate cake my great-grandmother ever made, but it is the only recipe she cut and pasted into her notebook. Or at least, it's the only cake in the surviving pages.

I don't know where this clipping comes from, but I'm guessing it was a magazine. The back of the paper has an advertisement for various books that came out in 1952. I only find the date noteworthy because all the kids were out of the house by then. Either she always got asked to bring the dessert (relatable), or she wanted to have chocolate cake regardless of whether anyone else was around (which is also relatable).

I had to ask: what makes this a "Domecon Cake"? At first, I thought it might have come from a region of France called "Domeçon" (with the little tail under the ç). However, this chocolate cake didn't seem particularly French. When I looked up the name, I found that "Domecon" is short for "Domestic Economy."

I didn't find any mentions of a "domecon cake" anywhere online, but I found a lot of articles about "domecon babies." During the early to mid-20^th century, the domestic science departments of various universities would apparently borrow babies from orphanages so the young women to practice parenting.

Oftentimes, the babies would be sick or underfed upon arrival. Restoring them to health became a class assignment. After a few months of scientific mothering, the babies would be returned to the orphanages and adopted out like nothing happened. No one kept records of who the babies were, where they came from, or what became of them afterward. So, it's almost certain that a fair number of grandparent-aged people today have gone their entire lives without knowing that they were once a class project.

The practice remains controversial to this day-- and I don't mean "controversial" in the lazy writer's sense of "makes everyone angry." Many people state the obvious: babies are not classroom supplies. However, others point out that the 1900s to the 1950s were a bad time to be an parentless infant, even if you were healthy enough not to threaten the orphanage's budget. And while no one would claim that college students raising babies in an artificial apartment is good parenting, it was difficult to find enough people with the will and funds to care for orphaned babies. Fortunately, we have a better social safety net today to help everyone in need-- right?

Obviously, I wasn't prepared to go from chocolate cake to lending babies. Let's get back to the cake.

We're supposed to melt the chocolate in the water. Later in the recipe, we are told to add it at the same time as the melted shortening. Naturally, this seemed a lot easier in one step. I could have done this in the microwave. But I've found that when you microwave fat and water together, they tend to pop, splatter, and make a mess that requires at least three dishrags. So even though the stove takes longer, it was the better option.

See? Easy peasy, even though it is curdled and oily for now.

I can't decide if this cake's method was faster than the usual "cream the butter and sugar, then beat in eggs one at a time" types of recipes. On one hand, we didn't have any long beating times. However, all of the bowls demanded a lot of counterspace (and later, dishwasher space).

But after everything was mixed and the pile of dishes had reached a respectable height in the sink, the batter tasted amazing.

As some domecon students may have said back in the day, "Oh baby!"

At this point, we ran into pan problems. We don't have any pan small enough for the recipe. I had to spread the batter realllllllly thin for this. I lowered the oven temperature to 300° so that the entire cake could rise before it firmed up. (For those who speak Celsius, we went from 180° to 150°.)

I got what I wanted from lowering the oven temperature, but I think my success came at the expense of a good cake. I can't tell what looked wrong about it, but it didn't look right. I told myself that the batter had tasted really good, so things couldn't go too badly.

Like the cake, the filling starts with a lot of bowls. Either 1950s domestic economy operated under the assumption that you had a dishwasher at hand, or you were supposed to really love getting up to your forearms in greasy suds.

A small stack of dirty bowls later, we were ready to cook this over what the recipe calls "a very low flame." It was barely different after the long cooking time. Given how much flour was in the cake filling, it should have turned into chocolate clay. 

It might have firmed up while cooling, but someone innocently wandered into the kitchen and asked "Whatcha making?" My dessert then realized there were witnesses and decided to embarrass me. It never got any better than runny gravy, not even when I put it in the refrigerator.

I didn't need to determinedly press on with the directions to know that most of this would drip right off the cake, and the rest would squeeze out as soon as I stacked the top layer on it. I put it back onto the stove to see if I could salvage it. This meant that I wasted a spoonful of the good vanilla because it cooked right out. But doesn't that look better?

I can only guess that my stove's "very low flame" was less than the recipe writers intended. Maybe gas stove valves have improved in the decades since this recipe was printed, allowing them to sustain a much smaller flame without sputtering out.

Having gotten this filling to act like it's meant to, it tasted exactly like a chocolate pudding cup. So even if the cake wasn't very good, I would definitely spread the filling in a different one.

Unfortunately we now had to set aside success and ice the cake. I wanted a thin coat of icing instead of burying the cake in a mound of sugar. But when I put the first smear of icing on top, I knew this would end badly.

Things went pretty well when we were doing the top. Sure, the cake showed through the icing, but we had successfully spread it without a single stray crumb. I almost felt confident before I got to the sides. Because I didn't yet have the new cake plate when I made this, the icing job ended horribly.

I think it's impossible (or at least really hard) to competently ice the sides of a cake if it's on a dinner plate. The raised rim gets in the way of your knife or spatula. You can even see that the cake looks slightly better where it was farther from the edge of the plate. 

After a minute or two, I realized that I was only making things worse. I dropped the knife into the spoon (after licking the icing off first) and decided the cake was done.

The filling stayed between the layers when we stacked them. However, it oozed out as soon as we cut a slice. I tried to tell myself I didn't mind, but it bothered me. 

But setting aside my first-time mistakes, this tastes like someone's birthday. It's just chocolatey enough to be really rich, but (dangerously) not so rich that you stop after just one sliver.

 

A few weeks later when some visitors dropped by, I decided to provide chocolate cake. This had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to test whether I could get the filling to stay in the darn thing.

This may a good time to mention that I splurged on a new set of 8" rounds. It felt very weird to buy brand-new cake pans. They usually just appear in my life. I've always used whatever happened to be in any given house I was in, gotten them as gifts, "borrowed" them from people (my cousin has long accepted that her round cake pan is on permanent loan), or --when all else failed-- bought them secondhand. But as of today, I own a matched set that no one has used before. It was so weird seeing shiny new pans in the oven.

I ordinarily wouldn't have bought something so thoroughly unnecessary. We have plenty of round pans in the house, even if none of them match. But these days, you never know what the tariffs will hit next. And dangit, I wanted to be able to stack a cake. The new pans sit very nicely next to the Soviet waffle irons and other kitchen frivolities.

Back to the cake. This time, I kept the filling at a simmer the entire time it cooked instead of lowering the burner much as it would go. By the end of ten minutes, this looked almost thick enough to serve as fudge.

After the filling was ready, it was time to stack our creation. You can see the the cake sagging in the middle. I think it just does that. I made sure it sprang back when lightly pressed, the toothpick came out clean, but the cake fell in the center anyway. I guess this recipe really wants to come out concave. If I were the sort of person who plans ahead, I would filled the shallow hole with fresh fruit.

It looks like I just plonked the cake on the counter, but it's actually sitting on a clear glass plate.

Getting icing onto the top of the cake went well enough. I could have piped a border around the rim and had a lovely (if incomplete) creation, but I decided I also wanted to ice the sides. 

Let's pause for a moment and look at the last few moments before things got irreparable.

If you're trying this at home, I suggest you ice the top and then drizzle some sort of thin, pourable glaze down the sides. If you don't, this will happen.

 

It doesn't look good, but I think it came out better without a dinner plate rim getting in the way. 

Setting aside the bad icing job, this is a pretty good chocolate cake. It's very tender, which is great when you're eating it-- and irksome when you're stacking and icing it. I think it'd be better as cupcakes, just because it doesn't have as much of a chance to fall apart on you. Making cupcakes would also let you avoid how badly this cake sagged in the middle. 

Even though the cake was good, but I think it got upstaged by its own filling. It tastes like really good chocolate pudding cups. But we only had few hours after cutting the cake before the filling slowly oozed out.

Soon thereafter, I decided to put the filling in a yellow cake. Because it was a little drippy last time, I let it get a lot firmer before taking it off the stove. This would prove a mistake. By the time the filling cooled, I could knead it like clay.

I worked it into a cake-size patty and flopped it into place. Then I thought that perhaps I should try a sample of it before letting myself get too happy. And I am glad I did. I thought it would be fudge, but instead it was gummy and sad (though the flavor was as good as ever). I quickly lifted it back off the cake, dropped it into the nearest bowl, and gradually added enough milk to make it right.

 

The cake crumbs make it look ugly and lumpy, but it tastes good anyway.

It was exactly as good as I hoped.

This is a really good chocolate cake, even though the recipe didn't seem to make enough batter for the pans it calls for. I think it'd be better as cupcakes anyway. But (as you likely have surmised by now) the filling is the really good part of the recipe. If you don't mind a small pileup of bowls in the sink, you should make it.