27 January is National Chocolate Cake Day – and you don’t need to have a birthday, wedding or anniversary to enjoy a slice.
Until the 1830s or 1840s, chocolate was primarily consumed as a beverage and chocolate cakes – as we think of them today – did not exist. According to the Dover Post, the chocolate cake was born in 1756 when a doctor and a chocolate-maker teamed up in an old mill and ground up a whole lot of cocoa beans. They used huge millstones to make a thick syrup which they then poured into cake-shaped moulds. This was meant to be transformed into a beverage.
Eliza Leslie, a popular Philadelphia cookbook author, published the earliest chocolate cake recipe in 1847. The book in which the recipe appeared was called The Lady’s Receipt Book. Unlike the chocolate cakes we know today, this recipe used chopped chocolate.
Sarah Tyson Rorer and Maria Paloa, who were also well-known cooks at the time, made a considerable contribution to the development of the chocolate cake and were prolific authors of cookbooks.
A company called O. Duff and Sons created the first boxed cake mix in the late 1920s, and in 1947 Betty Crocker released the first dry cake mixes.
To celebrate today is very easy – have some chocolate cake! Bake your own from scratch, use a boxed mix or buy one from the home industry, invite your family and friends over and enjoy some quality time together.
Use #NationalChocolateCakeDay to post on social media.
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