This recipe for a Cocoa Float is located on page five of Cowan’s Cocoa Insures a Wealth of Health, and a colourful illustration of the final product accompanies it. This recipe features eight common ingredients, all of which would have been accessible for the average Canadian housewife in the 1920s. While this recipe appears to be simple, the brief instructions may have made it incomprehensible to those with more limited knowledge of cookery. This suggests that women were the principal audience for this booklet, as they were the individuals who had knowledge and experience in the kitchen. At the time, this knowledge would have been taken for granted. The Cocoa Float recipe instructs the reader to scald milk and prepare the dish in a double boiler. This assumes that women had cookstoves with stovetops that allowed them to scald milk and use a double boiler. This also alludes to the fact that most women during the early 1920s knew how to scald milk, as well as use a double boiler, and had the other requisite knowledge necessary to prepare this recipe.

The Cowan’s Cocoa Layer Cake recipe is featured under the “Delicious Desserts” section on page ten of the cookbook. This recipe also features common ingredients, and Cowan’s Cocoa is undoubtedly the focal point. Once again, the instructions are somewhat vague. The recipe instructs the reader to “add flavouring” yet it does not provide any information about what that flavouring might be. It seems as though the authors assumed the average housewife in the 1920s would automatically understand what they were referring to. This helps to illuminate gender roles of this period, when women were expected to know cooking information and techniques without guidance because the kitchen was allegedly woman's place in the home. The Cowan’s Cocoa Layer Cake recipe instructs the reader to bake the cake in a moderate oven. The term, “moderate oven,” reveals that ovens were not equipped with thermostats and could not be regulated to a specific temperature during the time the booklet was made. Most housewives in Canada in the 1920s would have been using a wood-burning cookstove, which required much more attention when cooking and an understanding of what the right cooking temperature should be.