Oldies But Goodies: Chocolate Cake

Although I am not a religious person, after a discussion with my roomies last night, I decided that maybe I should take Lent more seriously. Or, at least the next 30 days until I take off for New Zealand (!!!). So, in an effort to do without something that is very important to me, I will spend the next month without:

CHOCOLATE.
(yikes)

In celebration of my new-found willpower, this post is about quite possibly the best chocolate cake I've ever made. It's from my favorite new cook book, the Watkin's Cook Book from my Great Grandma, circa 1925. Following the less than awesome outcome of my Cocoa Cream Cake, I was a little worried about baking yet another chocolate cake from the cook book. But my need to use up the one egg yolk from the previous recipe, and the simplicity of the recipe, convinced me to just do it.

So I did. Here is my Chocolate Cake:


Chocolate Cake (from Watkins Cook Book, 1925)

• 1/2 cup Watkins Cocoa
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup sweet milk
• yolk of 1 egg

Boil well together and let cool:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup sour milk* into which 1 teaspoon soda has been dissolved.

1. Mix both parts together and add 2 cups flour.
2. Bake in moderate oven* in layers.
3. Ice with chocolate icing and nuts.

Chocolate Butter Frosting (from Betty Crocker's Cookbook, 1969)

• 1/2 cup margarine or butter, softened
• 2 ounces unsweetened melted chocolate (cool)
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1-1/2 tsp vanilla
• About 2 Tbsp milk

1. Mix margarine and chocolate.
2. Stir in powdered sugar.
3. Beat in vanilla and milk until frosting is of spreading consistency. Fills and frosts two 8- or 9-inch layers or frosts a 13x9-inch cake.

So, the recipe seemed simple when I first read it. Then I realized: sweet milk? Sour milk? Moderate oven? Huh? After some googling, and a call to my mom, everything was made clear.

**Sweet milk is whole milk (which, might I add, I didn't use -- I used fat free, since that's all I had in the house). Sour milk is sweet milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice added to it (1 Tbsp per cup of milk). And a moderate oven is about 350 degrees. I actually really liked that I had to do a little sleuthing to understand the recipe...

So the cake was freaking awesome. The only weird thing is that there were some little chewy bits in between the layers, which I think came from boiling the butter, sugar, eggs and sour milk together. Not sure if I let it cool long enough, or if I should have boiled it for longer. Next time I might try boiling it for longer. But the cake and the frosting were delicious. All that was missing was some sort of decoration on top -- that's my next step...

Unfortunately, I don't get to make this again until April. Such is the life of a lapsed Catholic that still retains some semblance of Catholic guilt.

Happy (?) Lent!