That reads nummy! I'll have to see if I can persuade somebody to try it ...

My mother makes a cake like this, and glazes it with a chocolate-Guinness icing. It is delicious. Dense and chocolaty and not too sweet.

I'm not sure where she found her recipe, but hers is also in metric. As a native USian, she did the conversions and noted them.

My favorite recipe units story is the time my Polish best friend and I wanted to make szarlotka, a Polish apple tart. My friend's mother pulled out her gradmother's handwritten szarlotka recipe. My friend reads Polish, so could follow the recipe, but was stymied by one request for "three glasses" of an ingredient.

"Did she mean cups?" she asked her mother.

"Oh," her mother replied, "I know which glass she meant" -- rummaged in the cabinet for a minute, and produced an old glass teacup.

(The teacup turned out to be almost exactly 8 fl oz when I checked.)

Are you sure the pan isn't lined with *parchment* paper?

TexAnne@3: Are you sure the pan isn't lined with *parchment* paper?

Parchment paper would probably work, but the canonical cake-pan liner around here is wax paper.

I'll also note that "be careful of walking heavily" is, if anything, an understatement.

I do a chocolate stout cake in a bundt pan from Smitten Kitchen that is dangerously easy. No lining pans, no careful walking required. Link here and I also included some basic baking tips for those who are afraid of cakes.

In my case, it would definitely be parchment paper. The paraffin melted into the cake from the wax paper might be enough to kill me, and I'd rather not find out.

Tip for those who like baking parchment: don't bother with the stuff on rolls you can buy in the grocery stores. Go to a restaurant supply store or find an online supplier for commercial parchment. Half-sheet size will fit most cookie sheets meant for home ovens (while you're at it, you might want to get a couple of commercial-grade cookie sheets; mine are Chicago Metallic, were $10 apiece, and I've been using them for ten years without warping and without scorching the bottoms of any cookies), but you can always tear the full-sheet size in half if you can't find half-sheet size.

A box lasts a long, long time. I've had my box for nine years and it's only getting low now, and I use it to replace foil as well as wax paper. It's REALLY convenient.

Looks delicious. And looks like that particular recipe would not survive the subtraction of eggs or dairy.

For folks with food limitations, there are several vegan versions floating around the Internet.

This one looks like it would be good (since it has the sense to use chunks of chocolate to replace the butter, although I don't like the vegan margarine approach - I go for straight oil like canola or coconut)

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-food/recipe-chocolate-stout-cake/

200g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
200g brown sugar
200ml stout
2-3 tbsp cocoa powder
75-100g dark, good quality chocolate, broken in pieces
2 tbsp vegan margarine, melted
2 tbsp apple sauce
3 flax “eggs” (3 tbsp ground flaxseed + 75ml warm water)
powdered sugar, to dust

I've made this sort of thing a few times. (Using melted chocolate instead of cocoa, and I think the recipe involved cream cheese too. This changes the texture somewhat, I expect.)

Tasty. I don't drink beer (much) on its own, because I don't enjoy bitter without sweet, but the cake is fine.

Mmm, Guinness stout cake. Our local cupcake & pie bakery makes a very nice version of this, which they frost & fill with a wonderful Bailey's buttercream frosting that I wish I could find a recipe for.

Andrew @ #8:

I don't always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer to eat it in my chocolate cake.

Stay crumbly, my friends.

I shall do the sensible thing with this recipe; namely, pass it straight over to my wife, who has the triple benefit of being a better cook than I am, enjoying the process more, and having more time than I do :-)

As an aside... it's curious you call cups "English" measurements, because I've never seen them used in a cookbook published primarily for the English market.

Over here you're expected to own scales, those publishers that haven't meticated yet use pounds and ounces.

(for one thing, this makes things like sponge mix easy to remember - 2oz each of flour, sugar and fat per egg)

"The original was in metric form" initially misunderstood as meaning that it was in some form of poetic rhyme scheme.

We make something a bit similar from a Nigella Lawson recipe - the chief difference being the presence of sour cream and the absence of brown sugar. It works pretty well, though it's more dark and brooding than you'd expect a chocolate cake to be.

I made it very recently for winter solstice (probably summer solstice for most readers). Dear gnomes, please allow this url through as it points to chocolate cake:

http://wiseoldturtle.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/happy-winter-solstice.html

Dave@12: does that (use of measurements) hold true for older UK cookbooks? I'm remembering car travel after Worldcons in 1995 (when gas prices were quoted for both gallons and liters) and 2005 (when prices were quoted for liters only), but blanking on when metric measurements began appearing in the UK.

"English" as a US antonym for "metric" goes back >50 years in my recollection, even though US measurements didn't always match those then in use in the UK (e.g., "ton" = short ton, pints contain 16 ounces, ...).

Caroline @2, regarding other countries' "cups" --

My German mother-in-law shared her recipe for an apple loaf cake. The handwritten recipe called for "2 Pinnchen Rum", which I understood to be colloquial for 'small glass'; wasn't exactly sure, but a miniature glass we'd gotten at a wine-tasting sounded right (don't ask me why! Looking back now I don't know why the heck I thought that much rum would be workable; in my defense it was a new recipe to me). So I used 2. That amounted to 200ml (nearly a cup) of high-proof rum. We didn't let the kids have any of the cake! Talking to my MIL later, it turned out it should have been 2 shot-glasses' worth.

Chip@15: Mrs. Beeton quotes dry ingredients as lb/oz and liquids in (British) pints, so it goes back at least to 1860.

When I first encountered flour etc. being measured in volume, my reaction was pretty much "why would you do it that way?" Especially since, as I said above, when measured as weight the majority of "classic" recipes are simple ratios (usually of whole numbers of ounces), and the conversion to cups destroys that since it depends on the density of what you're measuring. (Plus I can never remember what a standard "cup" is, anyway...)

Hannah Glasse (1741) measures flour either by weight or by volume -- smaller recipes will call for pounds or ounces, but large ones sometimes have flour by the peck. Liquid measurements are done by volume, anywhere from wineglass to gallon. "Spoonful" is occasionally qualified by such terms as "dessert-spoon", and I think the unmarked state is a table spoon, which is NOT necessarily the 15ml modern tablespoon, but whatever size a soup spoon happened to be.

When I try to use any of her recipes that haven't already been redacted by a third party (bless you, Lobscouse and Spotted Dog), the longest part of the prepwork is sitting down with conversion tables and a calculator, not only to get consistent modern measurements, but to scale the things down -- I don't think my oven is large enough for a seed-cake made with a peck of flour and baked in a hoop the size of a moderate cart-wheel! I even halve the Lobscouse version, because I only need one 10" springform pan.

I'd have to go hunting for earlier cookbooks than that -- I know there's a transitional period between the medieval "until it be enough" and the attempts at reproducible measurements like Hannah Glasse's before the Boston Cooking School standardization came in with Fannie Farmer in the late 1800s.

The measurements got more precise as cookbooks became more of instruction manuals for housewives & servants who might not be well trained and less of a collection of mnemonics for skilled professionals... at least until you hit Escoffier, and that was more a training manual FOR aspiring professionals, and "until it be enough" was no longer sufficient.

Amelia Simmons (1796) uses both weight and volume (sometimes int he same recipe).

Cookies.

One pound sugar boiled slowly in half pint water, scum well and cool, add two tea spoons pearl ash dissolved in milk, then two and half pounds flour, rub in 4 ounces butter, and two large spoons of finely powdered coriander seed, wet with above; make roles half an inch thick and cut to the shape you please; bake fifteen or twenty minutes in a slack oven--good three weeks.

Once we finally gave in and got a kitchen scale it made it much, much easier to deal with recipes from multiple countries. (And, as others have said, it makes it much easier to deal with flours and other things prone to packing.) One problem we didn't foresee in choosing our scale, though, was finding one that was easy to switch from grams to ounces; we used to fiddle with the little switch hidden under a cover on the bottom of our scale, but eventually just left it set to grams and got used to doing the conversions.

On the "what size was that little cup they were talking about?" problem, I think I've previously mentioned the Brazilian "xícara de chá" ("teacup") measurement, which despite being standardized is still used in lots of modern recipes to mean anything from 200ml to 250ml.

David Wald: that Brazilian variable teacup reminds me of the maddeningly vague "scant" cup or fraction thereof, along with the "dash".

Interestingly, I've found some recipes that have a "scant" cup in some versions, and "7/8 cup" in others, and it helps to know that an eighth of a cup is two tablespoons.

Likewise, some "dash"es have "1/8 teaspoon" in alternate versions, and while 1/8 teaspoon measures are available but uncommon, honestly, it's not easy to approximate without one, and I resort to a literal "generous pinch" -- taking as much of the substance as I can between my thumb and forefinger. If it's liquid? Well, usually it's vanilla extract, and my principle on that is "a little extra rarely hurts." The exceptions are in Italian meringue and marshmallows, which, come to think of it, are also Italian meringue (plus gelatin), where the extra alcohol-based liquid messes with the texture.

Pro tip: the same principle does NOT apply to rosewater, unless you enjoy having your foodstuff's flavor approach rose-scented soap. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES and my spoiled batch of ratafia biscuits.

Also interesting note: the place I most often run into the "scant" or "7/8 cup" measures is in cake recipes using all-purpose flour. I learned in pastry school that this is a standard substitution for a full cup of the lower-gluten cake flour. As I keep cake flour on hand (my favorite pancake recipe calls for it, and we consider pancakes a dinner food around here) I'd be tempted just to go for a full cup of cake flour and screw this 7/8 business.

I have a kitchen scale, but it only has ounce/pound measurements, to two decimal places. I wind up doing a bunch of metric conversions in my head. My Victoria sponge came out just fine. :D

If you can afford one, and you don't need to measure anything more accurately than to the nearest quarter ounce / 5g (and IME anything less than that is done as teaspoons anyway), I strongly recommend that you buy an actual balance and a set of weights (in both g and oz) rather than a digital scale. This has multiple advantages: they never break, never run out of batteries, and you can switch between metric and imperial without having to wonder where the switch is :)

The one big advantage digital scales have (other than cost) is that you can measure everything directly into the bowl; and this is less of an advantage if, like me, you tend to overshoot and then have to carefully pick the grains of sugar out of the flour :(

I tried a balance scale. I didn't like it one bit. Far too clumsy and time-consuming to use. And I speak from having used them both in a small-scale home setting and a large-scale commercial bakery setting. A digital scale where you can tare the bowl with the touch of a button? That's for me.

I have now learned the verb "to tare", and my goodness, that's useful. (It's a little peculiar that I don't recall ever hearing it before, as I've worked with manual scales more than once, all the way back to childhood.) I'll have to remember that one.

Fade Manley @24, I knew the word "tare" as an adjective modifying the word "weight", but not as a verb. Nice to learn something new.

I'm not sure tare is "officially" a verb, but in English you can verb almost anything, and the meaning is perfectly clear in context so why not?

Upon checking, Dictionary.com lists it as a nice regular transitive verb, which comes originally from Arabic by way of Old French. The Arabic verb meant "reject, subtract, throw away".

I love the Internet.

I was NOT gnomed @25; I forgot to change my nym. Apologies to the gnomes.

The start button on our digital scale also says "Tare" on it. And I've developed a method for weighing objects that I'm mailing that are big enough to obscure the digital readout on the scale: turn the scale on, set the object on the scale, then reach under to push the "Tare" button. Remove the object, and its weight is shown in negative ounces (or grams, but the USPS likes ounces). I find this very useful.

I'm another lover of digital kitchen scales; I can switch metric to English, I can measure 32 cups of flour as quickly as 4, and with mine (which goes to 8 kg) I can even weigh a baby to make sure it's growing. (And yes, I have pictures of my children naked in giant bowls--how did you guess?)

Forgot to put the link in my previous post.

The dating for early weight-based recipes makes me rethink my notions of what might be found in the 18th-c kitchen. I'd never thought about scales. And when I did think about them, I thought more in terms of balance scales, which seem fairly precision-type equipment, and therefore expensive. OTOH, I recall a late-19th-c. scale that my grandmother had as part of family leftovers, and it was a fairly inaccurate-looking spring scale with a hook. (She never said what it was used for, but ISTR it had a max weight of 5 pounds and was marked in halves and quarters rather than in ounces.)

I don't know about the cost of 18th-century balance scales, but there's also the consideration that many of the ingredients were sold by weight as well, which might make it easier to keep measuring them in that fashion.

Seems to me that a two-pan balance scale (as opposed to a sliding-weight sort) wouldn't be that complex a piece of equipment.

Every shop would have balance scales in the 18th century to check for light coins. They were the equivalent of today's counterfeit-detecting pens, sitting beside every cash box.

Weights and balances are common long long ago--Leviticus has the command Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.

It's one of my amazements that things that could have been made took so long to be made--the double-beam balance (making the position of the weights in the pans irrelevant) didn't come into use until the 1800's.

re 34: It may not have been widely used until then, but Roberval demonstrated in in 1669, which makes it barely pre-Newtonian.

Jim #33 They were the equivalent of today's counterfeit-detecting pens, sitting beside every cash box.

Except that they worked.

C. Wingate @ 35

Thank you! I was almost certain that the double-beam balance had been demonstrated earlier, but the best I could find with a fairly quick search was the 1800's.

For an overly-enthusiastic expression of thanks. I have an egg sandwich if the gnomes would like some.

I made this for a family dinner for the 4th of July. The multiple-bowls technique is rather time-consuming to wash up from, but it was pretty easy to actually do. I don't have a circular 8" cake pan, so I used a squarish Corningware container instead. The corners ended up a bit dry, so I'd take it out a bit sooner next time. I served it with a strawberry sauce (made from fresh strawberries), which worked very well.

more spam, here and elsewhere