Cake is one of my favorite things to make because, honestly, who doesn’t like cake? Cakes are the center of all major celebrations and a nice slice of cake in the evening makes any ordinary day feel just a little bit decadent. I’ve found that a good, homemade cake never fails to impress so, if nothing else comes of this project, I want to hone my cake making skills so that I never have to reach for a box of cake mix again.
The other week I was craving chocolate cake, but didn’t feel like putting much effort into the actual baking. The Joy’s recipe for chocolate sheet cake, also known as Texas sheet cake, looked ridiculously simple, requiring little more than tossing the ingredients in a bowl and stirring them together. (Does anyone know why it’s also called “Texas” Sheet Cake? Did the recipe originate in Texas?) This cake is served from the pan, so I could just use my 9x13-inch Pyrex baking dish and not worry about unmolding the thing when it was done. I had all of the ingredients on hand, save for the buttermilk, so it really was the perfect recipe for a good cake with a modicum of effort.
On the dry ingredient team, you mix together 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and a half a teaspoon of salt. On the wet ingredient team, you first bring to a boil a cup of water, a half a cup of vegetable oil, a stick of butter, and a half a cup of cocoa powder. You pour the boiled wet team over the mixed dry team and stir them until just combined. Once that’s cooled, and you do want to let it cool lest you end up with scrambled chocolate egg cake, you whisk in 2 eggs, a half a cup of buttermilk, and a requisite teaspoon of vanilla. Pour that into your greased pan and bake for 20-25 minutes. That’s it. You’re done. You just make a fantastic chocolate cake from scratch. You made a cake that’s moist and slightly crumbly and darkly, richly chocolaty and that beats the pants off of any cake mix you could have bought.
Now, I’m happy with a plain, unadorned cake, but most people are going to want some frosting so it behooves a person to also learn how to make frosting when they’re in the process of making a cake. The Quick Chocolate Butter Icing suggested in the recipe seemed like an easy enough addition, but here’s what you don’t want to do: get distracted by the episode of The Killing on your Tivo, dump everything into a bowl at once, and then attempt to stir it. What’ll happen when you do that is that you’ll end up with something stiff, kind of chalky, and completely unspreadable. If you do that, you’ll only end up making it again, determined not to let frosting best you.
On the second attempt, I made a smaller amount of frosting because I had already eaten part of the cake plain, I only had an ounce of unsweetened chocolate left, and the Jewel I stopped in on the way home from work was out. So, I melted the one ounce of chocolate in a double boiler with a tablespoon of butter, stirred in a bit of cream and a splash of vanilla, then gradually beat in 2/3 of a cup of powdered sugar. The result was a thick, creamy, eminently spreadable topping that, while a bit sweet for my tastes, I think most people would highly enjoy on their cake.
In the end, it was an impressive effort, if I do say so myself. Cake, when it turns out as delicious as this one did, usually is.
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