Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [119]
In later years when Isabel and Owen began requesting Safeway sheet cakes decorated with Snow White and Crisco roses or Batman and Power Rangers, I remembered that Cake Bible cake and bought the desired cake, however tacky and artificial. If a tacky cake was what they wanted, a tacky cake they got. Isabel graduated from princess cakes around the age of eight, and when he was nine, Owen made his last request for a monstrosity of crushed Oreos and bubble gum ice cream featuring a representation of Optimus Prime. Or something like that. I miss the innocent pleasure they took in bad cakes.
A few years ago, I picked up a vintage copy of Peg Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book at the elementary school white elephant sale. Isabel began flipping through it and fixated on the “Cockeyed Cake.” It’s an easy cake that you mix in the pan in which it is baked. This is the perfect starter cake for a kid and involves less washing up than even mix. All on her own, Isabel baked it and said, “I don’t know why anyone makes any other cake, ever.”
Really, I don’t either. The cake is chocolatey but not too chocolatey. It is supremely moist and somehow remains so for days. Isabel photocopied the recipe and put it in a plastic page protector that went in the binder she’d started for recipes. She baked it for my father’s birthday one year and served it brownie-style, from the pan, unfrosted. It was, as always, perfect.
Recently, because I’ve been feeling sentimental, I called my aunt, Stephanie, to ask for the recipe for the chocolate cake that she served at all maternal family birthday parties. She said, “Oh, it’s that one-bowl cake from Peg Bracken’s book. I doubled the recipe and baked it in layers. Mother and I were talking about it the other day, how I made that birthday cake five times a year, every year, for thirty years. That’s a lot of cakes.”
So, the cockeyed cake from The I Hate to Cook Book is a family cake, twice over. Stephanie adapted Bracken’s recipe to make two layers, so you do have to use a bowl. If you want to make it in the pan, just cut the recipe in half and mix it in a greased 9-inch square baking pan. If speed and simplicity are the goals, this trounces mix.
Make it from scratch or buy mix? Make it.
Hassle: Easiest cake ever
Cost comparison: Homemade cake: $3.50. Betty Crocker mix chocolate cake, prepared: $3.80. I priced the homemade cake using homemade vanilla. If you use McCormick vanilla, the price for the whole cake catapults to almost $7.00. Make your vanilla!
Butter, for the pan
3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for the pan
⅔ cup cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup neutral vegetable oil
2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups water or 1 cup cold coffee plus 1 cup water
White Mountain Frosting (recipe follows)
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour two 9-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment paper.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the 3 cups flour, cocoa, baking soda, sugar, and salt.
3. Poke three holes in the dry mixture. Into one, pour the oil; into another, the vinegar; and into the third, the vanilla. (It’s not strictly necessary to poke the holes, but it is traditional.)
4. Pour the liquid over everything. As Bracken puts it: “You’ll feel like you’re making mud pies now, but beat it with a spoon until it’s nearly smooth and you can’t see the flour.” This can take a while. As my five-year-old niece, Stella, put it when we baked the cake together: “It looks all pimply.” Keep stirring and most of the pimples will burst.…
5. Pour the batter into the prepared pans. Bake for 30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick inserted