Chocolate Pound Cake

Do you ever just REALLY. NEED. CHOCOLATE. CAKE? Come on, I know you do. Well that was me the other night, so I pulled out a card from my beloved 1973 “McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection” (oh you know, the one with the red white and blue logo with the huge American eagle? Yeah, that one. Hard to miss.) and made cake. Because I needed cake. Immediately.

The problem is, this cake isn’t ready immediately. First off, they don’t tell you till step 3 that the butter needs to be room temperature, which means you have to put the eggs and sour cream back in the fridge and watch an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” while you wait. Then get back to it. Second, for a small cake, it needs to bake for over an hour – people, you’ve just bought yourselves another episode! Hello, Angela Lansbury! But have no fear – the cake is good – but the batter? THE BATTER IS THE BEST PART. Make sure to enjoy some while you wait…

And after the 3 (or 200) hours it takes to prepare it, this is actually a nice cake, with decent chocolate flavor similar to my favorite cookies (DSers, see recipe here)  HOWEVER, since I am a very picky customer, I will point out that for a pound cake, it was a little too light and fluffy. Too light and fluffy you say, how is that even possible? How can you complain about that? Well, I prefer a light and fluffy angel food cake but a dense pound cake, call me nuts. Still, this has a nice flavor and is quick to make will give you something to do while you wait for your online stream to buffer ;)

going in...

just out of the oven

Ingredients:

1 cup boiling water

2 squares unsweetened chocolate, cut up (Note: 2 oz)

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp. salt

½ cup butter (NOTE: room temp)

1 ¾ cups light brown sugar, firmly packed

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

½ cup sour cream

Method:

1.       In small bowl, pour boiling water over chocolate; let stand 20 minutes to cool.

2.       Meanwhile, preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease well and flour 9x5x3” loaf pan. Sift flour with soda and salt.

3.       In large bowl of electric mixer, let butter stand at room temperature until softened. At high speed, beat butter, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla until light and fluffy.

4.       At low speed, beat in flour mixture (in fourths) alternately with sour cream (in thirds), beginning and ending with flour mixture. Beat in cooled chocolate mixture just until combined. Pour into prepared pan.

5.       Bake 60 to 70 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.

6.       Cool in pan on wire rack 15 minutes. Transfer from pan to rack; cool completely. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar. Makes 1 loaf.

Quick Chocolate Cake

I love cake. OHMYGOD do I love cake. And I'll be honest, this is not the best cake ever, but when you just WANT CAKE (and come on, we all know there are times when nothing will do but cake!), this is FAST and YUMMY. Why buy a mix when you can literally throw things into the baking dish itself, bake for 20 minutes, and then happily scald your tongue on home-made cake? I couldn’t say.

Susan Katz’s brilliant 1978 “Just Desserts – Fast but Fancy” is one of my favorites. She has so many ideas that I would like to quit my day job to cook each and every one of them… well, I can dream, right? She even has a chapter entitled Desserts for Dinner. (She has also written a book called “100 ways to use yogurt besides eating it out of a container” – LOVE her to death!). When the sudden NEED FOR CAKE struck me, I turned to her and she did not disappoint.

This recipe – better than cake mix, I swear – is fun in that you mix it right in the baking dish. Seriously people, you are going to have cake SOON, and barely any dishes to wash! GET ON THIS! Even kids can do it, in fact it is perfect for them. Don’t have a mixer? Or are you just lazy? Who cares. YOU can make cake.

The only trick is that she’s not kidding when she says “There must be no delay in baking after adding vinegar” because that will activate the baking soda, and if not baked right away, the cake won’t rise. So be sure to have all your ingredients out in advance. This is as good a way to reinforce the practice of mise-en-place if I ever knew one! There: justification for baking cake: to teach yourself the importance of proper kitchen prep. (Not that you needed any justification.... )

 Dump in the ingredients!

 Mix well - and get into the oven IMMEDIATELY once the vinegar is stirred in!

You can frost this cake with just about anything, or heat up a nice glaze of chocolate, butter and a little grand marnier, or perhaps whisey and black cherries…. Possibilities are endless. You’re welcome.