Have Your Cake (and Eat It Too!) Recipe: Deep Dark Chocolate Cake

Throughout my life, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with cakes: I have either loved the frosting and hated the cake, or loved the cake and hated the frosting. Rarely has either extreme occurred simultaneously and I’m often (embarrassingly) left with a plateful of one or the other to scoop into the trash bin. Definitely not the type of behavior I am proud to admit.

To help alleviate my guilt over wasting any food at all, even icing, I’ve simply managed it instead by not serving traditional cakes outside the settings of birthdays, graduations and the occasional holiday. In fact, if you glance over the cake recipes in Inn Cuisine’s history, you’ll find I’ve only featured one other truly traditional cake (i.e. one that includes icing) in the past 16 months—that being a festive, fruit-topped 4th of July cake that I absolutely adore. The remaining cakes in the recipe archives are either cupcakes or variations on tea and coffee cakes, most topped with delicious fruity glazes, chocolate chips or nuts instead of traditional icing.

In effort to rectify my cake versus icing quandary, I turned to my effervescent mother-in-law who has the uncanny ability for making cakes I cannot possibly resist. Even when it comes to cakes I’m sure I’ll loathe (her recipe for Coconut Banana Cake comes to mind), she’s proved my taste buds wrong time and time again (by the way, her Coconut Banana Cake has become one of my all-time favorites).

The single source of more delightful dessert recipes than I can possibly divine from my vast collection of cookbooks, my mother-in-law has become a tried and trusted source for all things yummy, as this recipe for Deep Dark Chocolate Cake will prove. But before we go any further, there are two things about this cake you absolutely must know…

1. it’s entirely homemade, and
2. it’s easier to make and far more delicious than you can possibly imagine.

While I expected this cake to be good (it is chocolate after all,) I didn’t expect it to be the kind of good that makes you wonder why all chocolate cakes and icings can’t taste this delightful. Not only did it receive rave reviews from my panel of lucky taste-testers (who selflessly sampled a slice, or two, or even three in some cases), but all proclaimed its chocolatey goodness, “The best I’ve ever had!”

Since I haven’t (unfortunately) sampled all the chocolate cakes in the world, I won’t go as far as claiming it’s the best you’ll ever taste, but I can assure you it is reliably good and surprisingly simple to make. And if you bake, no matter how infrequently or reluctantly, I’ll bet you already have all the necessary ingredients to make this cake and its fantastic frosting on hand.

Why not check your pantry, your cupboards and refrigerator too…by dessert time, you can be having your cake and eating it too!

Deep Dark Chocolate Cake

(featured on Inn Cuisine, as passed down from my mother-in-law)

(update 6/7/09: original recipe from Hershey’s! Enjoy!)

• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 & 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa (I used and recommend Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa)
• 1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup boiling water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease and flour two 9-inch cake rounds or one 13×9x2-inch baking pan.

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the first six ingredients (sugar through salt); add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed for 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin); pour into prepared pan(s) and bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes our clean. If baking cake rounds, allow rounds to cool slightly before turning out onto wire racks to cool completely. If using rectangular baking pan, allow cake to cool completely before icing.

One Bowl Chocolate Frosting

• 6 tablespoons butter, softened to room temperature
• 2 & 2/3 cups confectioner’s (powdered) sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa (again, I used and recommend Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa)
• 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

In a medium-sized bowl, mix and beat all ingredients using an electric mixer. If icing seems too thick, add a touch more heavy cream until desired consistency is reached, taking care not to over-thin the icing. I have found these amounts enough to frost the top and center layer of two, stacked, 9-inch cake rounds (but not the sides) or the top of a 13×9x2-inch rectangular cake. If you are looking to frost the sides of the stacked cake rounds as well, consider doubling these amounts.

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