Cakes - Devil's Food Cake

Before we start, I had some music playing while Thomas helped me make this recipe.  This devil's food cake has been brought to you by the letters K., C., and the number Funk.  You know, 'cause the Ladies of Zion were totally funky for their time

Cake.  What can I say about cake?  I'd much rather talk about pie, but I'm not on the pie section this time around.  There are so many more options for pie.  Pie is so much more fun to make than cake.  But this isn't the pie section, it's the cake section.  So cake, it is.  Previously when I came to the cake section, I made Scripture Cake (a crazy, ugly, adventure that wasn't so bad), and Sour Milk Orange Cake (puzzling, messy, strange, and edible).  Let's see how devil's food cake stacks up.  This recipe is by Mrs. J.O. Botten who previously showed up with Orange Cookies (unusual texture, but not too bad).

Though I prefer pie to cake, I have certainly made cakes before.  This will be the first time I will have made a cake from scratch rather than from a mix.  A certain mother of mine alleges that back in high school I would make cake mixes and just eat the batter instead of making the cake.  Can I claim plausible deniability?

Oh high school.  I don't miss you.

On a slightly different note, I suppose there is more opportunity for decoration and creativity with cakes.  For example, from The Great British Bake Off:

That is Nadiya.  She bakes things and is super awesome.  If you haven't watched this show, find this season and cheer for Nadiya.  The great thing about GBBO is that everyone is nice, supportive of one another, and there is no drama aside from whether or not the bakers will be able to pull of their fantastic creations.  So stop reading this and go watch this show now.  Come back later.

Turning to the cook book now, the cakes section is easily one of the largest sections in the book.  I am only speculating now, but I think this may be due in part to the idea that cakes are a fancy dessert.  Before leavening like baking powder and soda, in order for a cake to be light and airy a baker would have to beat and beat and beat eggs by hand for a long time until they are light.  That is something that would take a long time and a lot of labor meaning that cakes would only be made for special occasions or be made by paid bakers.

According to this website, cakes have been made for millenia but for most of that time they were sweetened breads, often with fruit and or honey.  The word cake is a 13th century English word derived from the Old Norse word 'kaka', something which the Ladies of Thief River Falls probably knew and were proud of.  There are, unsurprisingly a few "kakas" in the Norwegian Dishes section of the book.

But I have a cake to make, so we should get started.

Preparation

I had three recipes to choose from on this page.  I was initially going to choose the top one, but I have no idea what Hershey's Breakfast Cocoa is.  Internet searches largely had antique Hershey's containers for sale.  Since I couldn't guess what was in Hershey's Breakfast Cocoa, that recipe was out.  Walnut Apple Sauce Cake was also out because the previous cakes were heavy cakes, and I wanted to do something different.  There were no instructions for the Devils's Food Cake, but how hard can a cake be?  The raisin rolls turned out alright, so we're going to be optimistic.  

Thanks, Mrs. J. O., for the lack of instructions.  Why weren't you thinking of bakers 60 years down the road who didn't learn how to bake cakes as children?

Ingredients, shmingredients.  Here's my assistant.  Ready, set, mess!

So it's not completely true that there are no directions for he recipe.  We have to mix the cocoa, soda, and boiling water first.  Presumably this will provide the lift for the cake, since we're not using Dutch process cocoa powder.  I wasn't prepared for how frothy and bubbly the soda and powder would get though.

As you can see, Thomas stirred the powder and soda a bit vigorously when he was shake shake shaking his booty

At this point I figured it would probably be a standard mix wet ingredients, then gently mix in dry ingredients.  Creaming butter and sugar always looks good and tastes good.  Creaming shortening and sugar looks and smells nasty.

Some day I'll learn to use something better than Paint... no I won't.

It all looked much better after adding the rest of the wet ingredients and flour.  We managed to mix in the flower without making much of a mess.  Then we folded in the cocoa powder mixture.

This is a common position for Thomas.  You know, in order to see something, you have to be able to drool in it.

Batter all mixed up, it was time to figure out what to do with it all.  My inclination was just to get a big spoon and go to town like I did back in the day, but I don't think Mrs. J. O. Botten would have approved.  So it was off to the internets to see what a devil's food cake was even supposed to look like.  Is it a sheet cake?  A 13x9?  A layer cake?  The correct answer, as it turns out is a layer cake.  Question two was how long to bake these things.  Fortunately, the internet knows everything, and this website said that two 9 inch round pans should bake for 25 to 35 minutes.  Perfect.

Here's the problem.  The cookbook says 325 degrees, and the website says 350.  What's 25 degrees amongst friends?  Then I failed to notice the website saying not to fill the pans more than half full.  As you can see below, I filled them more like 2/3 to 3/4 full.

Oiled, flowered, and overfilled.

Into the oven they go, and now time for the lickins.  Best part of cooking sweets.

We are nothing, if not delicate flowers in this house.

After cleaning of the faces, comes the waiting... and waiting.

30 minutes - smells good, but the batter is still VERY jiggly.  Glad I put a sheet pan on the rack below the sheet pans as the cake rose a lot.

35 minutes - jiggly

40 minutes - jiggly.  Was Mrs. J. O. Botten's oven a hot one?  I don't want to overcook this thing.

50 minutes - jiggly cake.  Impatient dad.  Actually did a toothpick test this time.  That was silly.

55 minutes - doesn't seem jiggly, but the cake failed the toothpick test spectacularly.  This could be a long day.

1 hour - I'm a patient man, but... no I'm not.  C'mon, cake!  Finish baking already!

70 minutes - It appears to finally be done.  I hope I haven't dried the thing out.  Biting into a dry, crusty hockey puck won't be as fun as it sounds.

They rose quite a bit, but look alright.

There weren't any frosting recipes that I could use from the cook book because any chocolate frosting recipes called for Hershey's Breakfast Cocoa.  What the heck is that???  So I just found a recipe online.  I hacked off the round top of the more lop-sided layer, inverted it on a big plate, and started icing.  Here's the finished product.

Nice, but Nadiya could have done better.  Still, I'm glad it's not a chocolate disaster.

Not too bad, if I do say so, myself.  I can see the advantage of having one of those rotating cake decorating platters, but again pie > cake, so I won't make the investment.

Tasting and Reaction

I will admit that it looks pretty good, far better than I expected.  Here's a look at the inside.  You can see that I didn't fully incorporate the cocoa mixture into the batter.  Oh well.  You can also see that I didn't have two straight-sided cake pans, so the frosting is pretty thick around the middle.  Not thinking about the nearly 7 cups of sugar in this whole cake.  My middle is thicker than it once was, all that cake probably isn't needed right now.  But this is for science!  For history!  For my belly!

That thing is huge

The cake is a little chocolaty, but not as much as I thought it would with a whole cup of cocoa powder.  The edge is definitely overcooked, as it is a little tougher, but it isn't too bad.  The inside is somewhat moist and the texture isn’t bad at all.  Most of the chocolate flavor definitely comes from the frosting.  If anything, it is a bit too sweet, but I think that comes again from the frosting.  This probably goes back to me not being so interested in frosting in general.  I like sweet, but frosting often is too much.

He's almost as neat as I am.

When James got home from school, his eyes got really wide upon seeing the cake.  Like a good dad, I immediately gave him a big slice.  

"Yummmy!  I like everything about it.  I like this [pointing to the frosting].  This is my favorite part.  I’m having my favorite part right now.  I like it because it isn’t so sweet. "

He often doesn’t care for birthday cake because it is so sweet… the inch layer of crappy frosting?

Sarah gets home and admires the cake.  

"It was good.  I wouldn’t have known it was from the cookbook [high praise!].  I think the frosting looks very nice too."

I will take the compliment, thank you.

Later on before bed, she has one more little piece, and I ask her if she is back because of the cake or because of the frosting.

"The cake itself doesn't have very much flavor, but that's ok since the frosting is more chocolaty.  A rich chocolate cake with rich frosting is almost too much."

My mom came by the following day, and some of that still very large portion of cake was forced upon her:

"It's very filling.  I haven't had a homemade recipe in a long time, so it's fun to eat one of these instead of a box cake.  This is better than most cakes, I mean, if you ask most people if they want cake for a birthday they'd rather have one of these than a box."

Final Thoughts

I understand that devil's food cakes are supposed to be a counterpart to angel food and that they are devil's food because they have extra chocolate than a regular chocolate cake.  If that is the case, then I can only guess how flavorless a regular 1951 chocolate cake would taste.  But honestly, aside from a little lackluster chocolate flavor to the cake itself (lack of flavor being as common a theme as any in the cook book), I think this cake may be in contention for the best thing I've made so far out of the cook book.  Aside from the long bake drying out the edges a little, the texture of the cake was pretty nice.  I might even be able to say that my presentation could have pleased the Ladies, something I would be proud of.

In the grand scheme of this blogging project, I'd say it is better than the marshmallow pie, probably better than the orange cookies and  probably even better than the mock apple pie.  It is entirely possible that this was the best recipe so far.  Well done, Mrs. J. O. Botten

Next time:  a guest post on Cookies by Sarah