Chocolate Cake with Homemade Chocolate Frosting

What can you say about chocolate cake that hasn't been said before?

 

"Yum!"?

"I'm in love!"?

"Best dessert ever!"?

"You call that measly thing a slice!?!"?

Cliches, the whole lot of them! There's nothing new to say about chocolate cake, yet, as a blogger, I must persevere. I must say something, anything! I have to make the chocolate cake new again, make it interesting enough to keep a reader's attention for a whole blog post.

But what?

Well, I suppose I can always tell the truth: Chocolate cake is easy. It's the frosting that's the hard part.

We'll get back to that in a minute. Let's start at the beginning: A Christmas present inspired me to bake this cake. The recipe comes from a book called Beyond Parsley, which was published in 1984 by the Junior League of Kansas City. Charlie's grandmother Carol (also known as Grammie O.!) gave me her copy for Christmas this year.

It's a beautiful cookbook, and I was excited to try some of the recipes in it. But I didn't know where to start. So I decided to do what I always do when I get a new cookbook: I flipped to the index and went straight to the entry for "chocolate."

This practice has always served me well before, and it did this time, too. What I found there was a recipe titled "Chocolate Cake with Fudge Icing."

The cake part of the recipe was pretty standard--nothing to write home about, I thought--but the finished cake was truly incredible. It's just the kind of chocolate cake that I always crave: moist, tender, mellow, and dense without being heavy.

The recipe starts with well-creamed butter and sugar . . .

. . . accompanied by all the usual suspects (vanilla, cocoa powder, eggs flour, etc.) and baking soda dissolved in a cup of boiling water.

The resulting batter was smooth and fluffy.

 The baked cakes turned out to be very pretty on their own and tall enough for torting.

What didn't go so well for me was the frosting. Beyond Parsley suggested a scrumptious-sounding fudge frosting that involved boiling butter and sugar and real chocolate. I have no doubt that this would have been the very best way to go with this cake; its mild chocolate flavor would have served as the perfect base for a rich, substantial, uber-chocolatey frosting.

But I was short on both candy thermometers and chocolate, and I knew that, with a shortage of ingredients and supplies, my fudge frosting might turn out to be a gloppy mess.

So I decided to make up my own chocolate frosting to use what little chocolate I had (which was a single bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate from my Christmas stocking). I consulted some of my favorite cookbooks for chocolate frosting tips: one recipe called for whipped eggs, another for a double-boiler, another for rum and coffee, and another for granulated sugar.

There was no consensus to be found, no sure means of making a great chocolate frosting, so I decided to improvise with my limited list of ingredients and my limited frosting experience. I melted the chocolate bar and set it aside to cool. From there, I combined butter; splashes of vanilla, milk, and spiced rum; and a whole lot of powdered sugar in a bowl. After combining these well, I added more powdered sugar until I had enough frosting to cover both cakes. Then I stirred in my melted chocolate.

The resulting frosting was just what I expected: it was smooth, chocolatey, and very, very, very sweet. I licked the spoon and gagged a little. Oops!

To get the proper texture, I had added far too much powdered sugar. Perhaps if I had started with more chocolate or more butter, things would have turned out differently, but who knows? Perhaps without whipped eggs or cream of tartar or double boilers, great chocolate frosting cannot be created.

Still, when spread thinly and with restraint, my frosting was quite serviceable. The frosting's sweetness worked well with the understated darkness of the cake layers, especially if the slice was briefly microwaved so that the frosting turned all liquidy and limp.

So what can I say at the end of yet another battle with chocolate cake? "Yum," of course, and "Thank you Grammie O.!", and "Who has a candy thermometer that I can borrow?"

All these would make fine morals for this blog post, but what I really learned was that if your cake is good enough, your frosting needn't be more than an afterthought--and only a pretty, fluffy, mouth-achingly sweet afterthought, at that!