The Real Duncan Hines Chocolate Cake From Scratch - Old Cookbook Show
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- The Real Duncan Hines Chocolate Cake From Scratch - Old Cookbook Show
Who was Duncan Hines? Was Duncan Hines real? Can you make a Duncan Hines Cake from scratch?
Cake:
½ cup butter
2 cups sugar
4 squares bitter chocolate
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 ½ cups cake flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups sweet milk
2 egg whites
Frosting:
2 eggs
2 Ibs. xxxx sugar sifted
½ lb. butter
4 squares bitter chocolate
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups chopped nuts
3 tablespoons cream
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L1S 0E9
Glen: "It tells me to sift it together three times"
Glen: *Mixes for 2 seconds*
Glen: "There we go"
🤣Noticed that.
Yes, renegade Glen.
pure canadian humor that
goes with: "Vanilla ...measured carefully"
(the eyeballing win)
What?! I live in Orange, MA! I couldn't believe it when I heard you say Orange MA. We're a small town of 9,000 with a mere 3 stoplights in town. The White Drum became a delicious Chinese food restaurant in later years but has sadly been abandoned for near 20 years now. It was on what is now Rt2A, but what was the main road from east to west in MA so it definitely makes sense that it's in this book. Thanks for sharing Glen! Made my morning lol.
I think it would be fun to do a head-to-head comparison between this cake and the closest equivalent boxed Duncan Hines cake.
Excellent idea!
Boxed Duncan Hines chocolate cake always seemed to have a chemical aftertaste to me.
Let us know how the comparison goes.
When i write down someone else's recipe by hand, I use the side by side method. I guess I'm Duncan's audience!
Thanks so much for this show. I love food and the history of food!
I think it’s a great method for noting the ingredients, and the method. It’s the one I use, too!
I love that format. You don't have to keep jumping from the list on top to see when and what you're supposed to do with an ingredient. Unfortunately, there are very few recipes formatted that way.
I never knew that it was a thing. I too hate jumping from the ingredients list to the directions, so what I do is throw everything together and call it a day.
I really appreciate Glen leaving in the footage of the milk bag change every time. There's something relaxing in watching it. It's like coming home.
That looks like my grandma’s cakes. She didn’t disdain box cake - we had it most of the time - but it was always “box cake”. If she just called a cake “cake” it was made from scratch.
Watching this while eating the chocolate zucchini bread I made myself.🤣 If anyone is going to make this, I suggest dividing the sugar in the cake batter in half, one half to be creamed with the butter and the other to be added into the egg whites in batches while beating them. Meringue is more stable than just egg white and can give you even fluffier cakes. I do this trick when I make pound cakes, to which I don't even add any raising agents, and they turn out soft and moist every single time.
Thanks!
Great to know, thank you!
Leftover frosting. Put any remaining frosting into a disposable piping bag liner, lable, and then put it in a ziplock bag in the freezer. Even 2 or 3 tablespoons can be useful! It is not uncommon for me to have 6 or 8 bags of dibs and dabs in my frosting bag in different flavors and colors( you can add more color too!). These little bags can add some writing to a cake or make a super fast batch of decorated sugar cookies with the kids.😊😊😊
You know what i like best about your cooking videos? Your casual, relaxed method. Other channels can take the fun out of it. Got to be an exact 1/2 teaspoon. Eggs whipped to this exact consistency. Measure! Weigh! Beat for 30 seconds! Yeah, ok. Maybe if you’re a baker and everything needs to be precisely the same every time. But i’m just a person in the kitchen trying to enjoy baking a cake because the kids are coming over. Don’t ever change your style Glen. 😄
My chocolate cakes come out light too. The only one I've made that came out dark was Doris Day's fudge cake made with cocoa powder....
I once ran out of white sugar in the middle of a snowstorm. Replaced white with brown sugar. Best thing I've ever done! The cake tasted like the old fashioned Susie Q recipe!
Brown sugar is better for almost anything.
Simple syrup? Fantastic. Coffee? Delicious. A little pinch to spice rubs or sauces? Fantastic. Baking? Better taste *and* more moisture
For my birthday yesterday my wife was searching for a chocolate cake recipe! Now you post one the day after lol
I think rather than the lemon juice in the frosting, maybe some orange juice and some orange zest. It would be a Chocolate Orange Cake! Perfect for Christmas time!
I think the icing may have been easier to spread if the nuts had been chopped finer than you had them, but it would probably be just as good to sprinkle the nuts on top of the finished icing. In any case, that cake looks delicious!
I had watched this when it first was presented a year ago and found it very interesting and enjoyable. This time around it was equally so. I never tire of Glen and his droll sense of humor. Love it all. Thanks, Glen. - Marilyn
Betty Crocker catching some epic shade here.
It is a delight when folks know and love their companion
We just moved to Kentucky...and was happy to find out that Duncan Hines was from Bowling Green Kentucky...there is a museum here....wish they gave away free cake. THANKS for the video.
Welcome to Kentucky. I, too, just moved here 2 years ago. I learned the same thing after moving here. There is a Duncan Hines Scenic Byway in Kentucky about 80 miles long.
That's soo cool right?...It was news to me that he was a real person...we sure do love it here!.We were tired of the dry west!
I think the lemon juice in the frosting is intended to "cook" the egg yolk and thus thicken the frosting.
This was my thought as well.
Ohhhhh. Interesting. But it would also cut the sweetness.
A true and thorough triple sift if ever there was one!
DH cake mix always seems to get the highest ratings among the designated boxed cake aficionado’s. They’re certainly consistent.
They’re the only one I have found that still makes a spice cake mix.
They are the only one my parents would buy and they are still the only one I buy.
I’ve noticed DH has the best fudgey brownie mix too.
I knew Duncan Hines was a real person that reported on his travels throughout the US.... but didn't realize he was essentially a UA-cam food/travel vlogger , but about 80 years ahead of the cruve .....before UA-cam, before electronic computers , and TV was in its infancy... you had Duncan Hines
That's kind of a dumb and ass backwards way to look at things though . Duncan Hines wasn't a travel vlogger, travel vloggers are whatever Duncan Hines was. Also he was far from the first. People have been writing about their travels in various forms for centuries. There really isn't anything new under the sun.
@@Shinkajo go outside, get a hobby.
@@Shinkajo you don't say....
Well I apologize if the word order my brain chose offended your finer sensibilities and the rather mild trolling of history / sarcasm triggered your inner demons.... bless your heart.
My parents were from Bowling Green, and Mom told me many times about playing in Mr. Duncan Hines' front yard. She said he never offered the children any cake, though... but she did say he was a nice man. Mom went on to make many hundreds of cakes in her life and she never used a boxed mix.
@@alexlail7481😂😂😂
Love this whole recipe especially the frosting... bet you could have swapped out the heavy cream and lemon juice with sour cream and it would have served the same function...I make a sour cream chocolate frosting that's similar... so yum!
I like how the recipe is printed in the book - I'm constantly going back and forth (on my phone) between the ingredients and directions. Cake looks yummy!
6:25 cannot get over the bagged milk in Canada. Its fascinating (not in a bad way).
It’s a pain in the arse 😂 I like gallon jugs so much better but I do admit the milk doesn’t go bad as fast but still….when someone misplaces the jug we all lose it at our house 🤣
@@MamaStylesyes but the bags are a little better environmentally!
The thing I hate, is cutting the bag so it flows out at a normal flow rate.
And for some reason, I always have run off, it the bottom of the jug, when I change it. That has to be rinsed out! 😮
Whenever he has to change a milk bag, he always does a nice long shot of it. He is well aware of how weird many non-Canadians find it, so I'm convinced he does it on purpose just to annoy a few people.
the reason i am here is because the first cookbook show i saw there was a bag milk coming out of the fridge! i sent a link to a canadian friend, and asked, how did i know it was a canadian show? she didnt know... ( i have been away from canada for about 30 years) ...the bag milk of course!
His guide books sound like the precursors to the AAA guides my parents used to get and I used to read when my parents took me on road trips. And Glen secretly looking for recipes that give him a reason to break out the copper bowl!
I had the same reaction as Glen to the nuts in the frosting making an unpleasant job even more so. And then there’s the odd look that makes people think your frosting is a lumpy mess. Cake looks good - will have to give it a whirl.
3 a.m.. on my side of the planet and waking up early to watch a new episode is a fine way to start a day
I like the note at the bottom of the recipe at the end: "Don't try to squeeze a 9" cake into an 8" pan... blah... blah.. blah.." Since my kitchen is not full of an endless selection of pan, I use what I have and no one ever complains because cake is good. Cake is good if it is tall with a small diameter, it is good if it is short with a large diameter, it is good as cupcakes or even as a loaf. Precision is indeed overrated.
Unless the batter overflows the pans!
@@rowanrobbins Ahhhh 💥Explosion of deliciousness!💥 Seriously though, as long as you understand that the batter will rise and account for that then any pan will work. 😊
do you find that cakes cook differently in different pans than recommended?
putting the same amount of batter in a smaller pan makes a thicker cake, and i don't really feel like paying to close attention to cake baking so I usually just go with what recipes say since i have the pan set anyways.
The very detailed recipe style ("don't dare use the wrong diameter pan") really contrasts with the Depression-era recipe book style that is basically a list of ingredients and assumes you know how to bake a cake.
If icing a round cake was more than a "once or twice" thing, you can get a platter that rotates and allows you to get a nice, even coating of icing. A lot less aggravating.
The thing I found the most unusual about this recipe was the lemon juice in the chocolate frosting. I don't think I have ever seen that before but I agree with your thoughts on how it adds a contrast to the sweetness. Not sure I would ever try it though. Oh and yes, I love nuts but I either would have left them out entirely or maybe just sprinkled on to the top afterwards.
The cake does appear to have risen quite high though compared to box mix cakes. I wonder if that's due to the egg white being beaten separately from the yolks. That I think I will try.
That cake looks amazing. I remember grandma’s cakes would be lighter than boxed mixes. I think boxed cakes contain coloring to make them darker.
If it's chocolate there's variations of chocolate. With all the milk in this one to the ratio of chocolate it's basically a milk chocolate cake. If coca powder especially dutched processed that's made with more alikine removing the acid or black coca that's has been heavily alkalized these powders intensify the dark chocolate colors. Although, especially with non chocolate cakes you're right they do contain food coloring. I'm not sure about the chocolate ones though.
I'd really like to see recipes in the call-and-response style you pointed out.
Beats the heck out of "Combine xxx with the next five ingredients and ..."
Right?! I hate when I'm forced to count things (too much like math).
‘Shout Out’ style? Neat. Didn’t know what it was called. Seen it once a few years ago and have been writing recipes that way since. Just seems easier
Am I the only one who thinks of one of the funniest scenes ever on Schitt's Creek, when a recipe calls for folding?
My mother was famous for her lemon meringue pie..the recipe is in this cookbook.
Haha that reaction when he explains why he wouldn't put the nuts in the frosting... Priceless! 🤣But I *do* wonder how thick layer of frosting you'd have to put on in order to use the full amount!
I miss the days when every stop on the highway in every state didn't look exactly the same: same fast food places same hotels, same gas stations. A lot of local color and flavor has been lost. I'm only 63 and I remember the excitement of traveling in the 60s and 70s and discovering local places to eat and stay. I still look for those kind of places on road trips!
I grew up next to Orange, MA - and know the "White Drum" although it was a Chinese restaurant when I was there in the 1980s. Locals still call it the White Drum despite many name changes. It is now abandoned - but is a very interesting round Art Deco style building in the middle of nowhere.
I really enjoy learning about cooking from these old cookbooks. There's nothing new. When I hand write out recipes I use often and put them in a binder, I have formatted them in the same way that they are formatted in this cookbook. I write the ingredients in one color ink and instructions in another color, and I feel it helps me cook more efficiently. Great program. I traditionally make the chocolate cake and frosting from the Hershey's coco powder package every year. I will be making this one soon. Thank you.
Trish here (using hubby’s accnt). Great recipe, Glen, and it looks yummy, but I was literally LOL when you stirred the baking powder and salt into the flour 3x with a fork and called it “sifted!” 😂
Back in the day, we had actual flour sifters. I still have one or two from the 30s and 40s. It was a coffee can looking thing, (mine is painted white with red strawberries) and inside it is equipped with a set of three screens. There was either a small handle that you turn on the side, or a mechanism behind the handle so that when you squeezed the handle, the screens would all move in opposite directions and the flour would come out “sifted.” She meant for you to run it through 3x until it was completely sifted and incorporated! But I’m not picking on you; I only know this because my folks grew up in the depression. But if you look on eBay, etsy, Walmart and amazon, someone is bound to have one. Happy baking!
Have a friend who trained as a pastry chef in France. She told me sifting is a waste of time and uses Glen’s method. And now so do I.
I have the original 1939 book. The chocolate cake recipe is identical with a few amount changes and a different frosting. But the recipe is attributed to a different person, not "Mrs. Duncan Hines."
Love the "call and response" description of how the recipe was written.
That's a beautiful, silky batter. "Precision is overrated.". 😂
The cake looks delicious. Watching you crack the eggs reminds me of making a chocolate oatmeal birthday cake this past week. The second egg i put in the batter was iridescent green. It didn't smell bad, but that batter went to the compost pile.
I truly like cakes made from a box mix better than a lot I’ve had from actual bakeries!! From what I understand many in-store bakeries just thaw items out that come in frozen!
Yeah, I would have passed on the nuts, too, as soon as you said it I was going, “no, no, don’t do it!” I love nuts, but there’s a time and a place and frosting isn’t it.
Again, this looks delicious! There aren't too many recipes that you make that don't look delicious ❤
The way my mind works, I always loved that column format and miss it. The thrown all together in a lump of words to make a sentence has had me flustered more often than not. I work methodically and have read a recipe, to follow along, and get to the last sentence to find out I was supposed to do something earlier only it never mentioned that in the right place. Give me the column format.
Hi Glen! I've expect you'll find an adjustment screw for the mixer's blade hidden in the opening in the hinge when the head is lifted up. Maybe it will help you get your mixer blades better scraping the bowl. Cake looks delicious!
Personally,I love all citrus and chocolate. As for the nuts, I'd chop them and sprinkle them over the cake after it was iced.
Love Duncan Hines and love that cookbook! (In a similar vein, 80 years from now someone will be saying “Dolly Parton (or Mrs. Fields or Famous Amos) was a real person”.)
Glen, you listed the wrong amount of butter.
Cake looks great 👍
Thank you!
Fixed it.
I personally like that style of recipe and often when copying a recipe will do it that way.
I do that as well 😊
For viewers, just remember that Bakers has changed what a square of chocolate is! 1 square of chocolate used to be 1 oz, and each bar had 8 squares. Now Bakers packages the same 8 oz of chocolate in *two* bars, 4 oz each, so a square is only 1/2 oz! This is a very, very recent change, and it significantly affects recipes.
READ THE BOX - Bakers clearly notes how the new 'square' is configured.
The old 'square' had two parts, the new 'square' has 4 parts. It doesn't change recipes at all, if you just take a moment to read the box, and realise that any recipe that asks for 1 square of chocolate is asking for 1 ounce of chocolate.
They aren't trying to trick you, they just changed the shape.
Thank you
Blessings
chocolate cake 😋 luv the old recipes and adventures books
Glen, given your love for cookbooks (and our love for watching you and Julie be the guinea pigs on some of these recipes) have you ever thought about compiling all of the success recipes, your "method" meals, the What's in the Pantry meals, and/or the "recipes from the side of the fridge" into a book for future cookbook collectors to enjoy. :)
The calling response style is my favorite kind of cookbook. It's how I organize my own cookbooks at home.
I love the layout and use the format for my own recipe book.
Now you have to get betty crockers cookbook and do a cake throwdown
I did not want to watch this (not really cooking sweets), but your video turned out to be useful and fun. Good job!
LOL Glen pulls out the old bag o'milk and Im like what the heck is it the 80's again???
The Smithsonian's magazine ran a n article about Duncan Hines about 40 years ago. If I recall correctly, Hines was approached to license his name for the line of cake mixes, but I don't recall how much input he had into the development after that.
Perfect 👌💯 but using uncooked egg on frosting?
Bag milk is so weird, never have encountered it anywhere in the U.S.
My absolute favorite cake is made from Duncan Hines Moist White cake mix, frosted with chocolate French buttercream.
Going to have to try this one, though!
I’m going to toast the nuts, see what that does to the flavor and texture
Yummy!
That cake looks fantastic.
Alternating flour and milk. Brings back memories of Mom giving me instructions in the kitchen. Oh, the amount of time I spent folding in chocolate, egg whites or flour. I remember white mountain frosting. Mom used to watch Julia Child on the little Tv while drinking wine.
I wonder if the reason the page formatting changed is because as soon as it became cheap to print a colour photograph of a recipe, cookbooks had to become bigger to accommodate a picture for each recipe that was in it. So instead of having a book where there could be 3 or even 4 recipes a page with a segmented ingredient list on one side and the attendant 'bulletpointed' step in the recipe on the other side, instead you have a book where you have one recipe spread over 2 or 3 pages. Quarter to half a a page of ingredients (usually half are reasonably expensive) then a good page and half of prosses, and at least a half if not a full page picture of what it ought to look like pre serving (or in the case of cakes or anything made in a dish pre first slice)
Love it glen!
I was distracted by the Christmas Nut Cake on the opposite page....Whisky instead of rum...Love me a good Christmas cake!
Those two Rochester NY restaurants in the pages you showed were all the rage back in the day, and not far from where I lived.
I remember the White Drum from when I was a kid! Hey, here from Winchendon Mass. So funny you would read this! The White Drum closed in 1976 saddly.
How interesting, lemon juice in a chocolate frosting. To cut the sweetness seems to be counterintuitive for a frosting…
Hey that page you showed has my Rochster,NY on there! I will definitely try this chocolate cake!
I'd just sprinkle the chopped nuts on top, maybe on top of the icing in between the cakes too. I agree, too messy to ice a cake with frosting that has chopped anything in it.
Amé esta receta
You should come to Bowling Green Kentucky. He's from here and we have a festival in his honor every summer.
Many of my mother’s recipes were written in that older style & I tend to write my recipes this way.
Not sure if I could bring myself to put a raw egg in my frosting...that's just my aversion! Otherwise, this looks like a great cake recipe! Thanks, Glen!
Nice frosting job. Just in time for Halloween.
Aww man, it's Sunday night and I'm too tired to bake a chocolate cake right now. Sleep, is overrated...........
That frosting gave me fits!
Any idea why the word 'icing' is xxxx'd out on the recipe? Would this suggest that the baker decides? Rather curious. Great recipe and thanks for sharing.
The more x's the finer the grind of sugar - depending on where you live 4X or 6X is considered 'icing' or 'confectioners' sugar. But some brands will boast 10X, which is very powdery. Some commercial bakeries will use 16X
Very cool! Thank you so much for your explanation. Never knew that, lol.@@GlenAndFriendsCooking
Gotta love the is there/isn’t there enough milk in the bag quandary. Shoot. We should start a pool for the next cake vid!
So I made this wonderful cake, but used your recipe for browned butter frosting. I think that was a mistake. I think the frosting overwhelmed the lightness of this cake. I should have used the frosting recipe that was made for it. I have made the browned butter frosting for a darker chocolate cake you make. That was perfect.
Interesting recipe. I'm slightly freaked out by the thought of a raw egg in the frosting. Does the addition of the lemon juice "cook" the egg or cause some chemical reaction with the egg so the egg isn't still considered "raw?"
If the nuts were chopped extremely fine (a few pulses in a blender or food processor would do it), you could dust the entire surface of the frosted cake with them like sprinkles and it would work well.
Thats exactly how I write out recipes for myself….seemed to make sense for me.
Duncan Hines...Howard Johnson. Those names from my childhood! Now we all will be looking for his cookbook; maybe not so much his famous commentary on inns and restaurants.
I just bought this cook book on etsay the old owner left a note and had his old address in it.
omg chocolate is my weakness thank you for shows this to us
KA Mixers have an adjustment screw where the head pivots up. The scraper can be lowered so that it scrapes better.
It's been adjusted, still doesn't scrape.
Interesting with the lemon juice.
Yeah. That looked for like more than two TABLEspoons to me. Yikes.
My guess is that style went away due to all the white space it uses. If you are publishing a book that's just a mass of recipes, you can add more recipes to the pages & splash "200+ recipes!" on the cover. On the other hand, if you are publishing a book emphasizing the story of the recipe, you can add more prose to the page.
Probably true, but I really like that style. It makes it really unlikely that you will miss an ingredient or a step and leaves room for annotations like adding flour at high altitude.
@@rabidsamfan I agree - for simpler dishes, I do something similar on my jotted-down recipes. Makes it less likely I'll skim past a step.
That was my guess too. I also suspect that style might be more work to typeset, lining text up vertically and horizontally, in an era when that was still done by hand instead of computerized.
I have a few recipes written in sort of the reverse of that style. Each step starts with a brief instruction like “beat together:” followed by a bulleted list of the ingredients to be combined in that step.
Mrs Duncan Hines is likely Florence Chaffin Hines.
I love credit where credit is due..and it’s due to the woman who created the cake. (We can also assume it’s grandmother Chaffin or maternal grandmother unknown’s work, too.
He was married thrice.
Florence Chaffin Hines
(m. 1905; died 1938)
Emelie Tolman
(m. 1939; div. 1945)
Clara Wright Nahm (m. 1947)
So a technical question: What do you do with the microphone so that we don’t hear the loud stand mixer at all, and your voice is so clear?
In the edit software you can isolate some constant drone sounds like the mixer, and edit them out.
@@GlenAndFriendsCooking That's so great. I wish a couple other cooking videos I watch would do that. Thanks for the reply.
Wow. I would really like to see a comparison between duncan hines cake from scratch vs (bog standard) duncan hines box mix.
The two column recipe style probably was popular due to recipe cards. Most people don’t use cards now.
Darn! I wanted to see how you managed to spread that frosting with the nuts in it! I wouldn't do it. I would put the nuts in between and on the top after I spread the frosting.
What a fun cake! are you at all worried about the raw egg in the frosting? I am guessing not because you ate it. lol