It’s National Chocolate Cake Day.
In America, chocolate was consumed primarily as a beverage until the 1830s or 40s. Chocolate cakes, as we think of them today, mostly did not exist then. According to the Dover Post, the chocolate cake was born in 1765 when a doctor and a chocolate maker teamed up in an old mill. They ground up cocoa beans between huge millstones to make a thick syrup. The liquid was poured into molds shaped like cakes, which were meant to be transformed into a beverage.
A popular Philadelphia cookbook author, Eliza Leslie, published the earliest chocolate cake recipe in 1847 in The Lady’s Receipt Book. Unlike chocolate cakes we know today, this recipe used chopped chocolate. Other cooks of the time such as Sarah Tyson Rorer and Maria Parloa all made contributions to the development of the chocolate cake and were prolific authors of cookbooks.
The first boxed cake mix was created by a company called O. Duff and Sons in the late 1920’s. Betty Crocker released their first dry cake mixes in 1947.
- There is a correlation between the amount of chocolate a country consumes on average and the number of Nobel Laureates that country has produced.
- A jewel thief made off with $28 million dollars of gems in 2007 because he was able to gain the trust of the guards working the bank in Antwerp, Belgium, by repeatedly offering them chocolate.
- Theobromine, the compound in chocolate that makes it poisonous to dogs, can kill a human as well. You’d have to be a real glutton to go out this way though, as an average 10-year-old child would have to eat 1,900 Hershey’s miniature milk chocolates to reach a fatal dose.
- It’s believed that people who are allergic to chocolate are actually allergic to cockroaches, as around eight insect parts are typically found in a bar of chocolate, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
- Chocolate milk was invented in Jamaica. Irish botanist Sir Hans Sloane is usually given credit for mixing chocolate with milk when he was in Jamaica in the early 1700s, though it’s likely he wasn’t the first person on the island to do so.
- A 2013 study found that the scent of chocolate in a bookstore made customers 40% more likely to buy cookbooks or romance novels, and 22% more likely to buy books of any genre.
- A 2004 study in London found that 70% of people would reveal their passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar.
- Americans buy more than 58 million pounds of chocolate on Valentine’s Day every year, making up 5% of sales for the entire year.
- The Brussels Airport is the biggest chocolate seller in the world, as vendors there sell more than 800 tons of chocolate every year.
- The first French word for chocolate mousse translates in English “chocolate mayonnaise”
- The “blood” that you see in infamous “shower scene” in Psycho is actually chocolate syrup.
- In the U.S.A, “chocolate decadence” cakes were popular in the 1980s; in the 1990s, single-serving molten chocolate cakes with liquid chocolate centers and infused chocolates with exotic flavors such as tea, curry, red pepper, passion fruit, and champagne were popular.
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