A recipe for perfect chocolate cake and even better icing
This week, we’ve got a guest author: my sister Emma, mentioned briefly in another edition, here to do what she does best, which is write about dessert.
Opening the family cookbook, it takes little time to find the recipes I’ve most frequented. Dog-eared, torn, crinkled from an overturned water glass, gritty with brown sugar residue, stained with unsweetened chocolate and dried egg yolk, these pages are fossilized with evidence of overuse. I’d say these markings are standard for well-loved recipe in any family cookbook, but it would be a lie: I, specifically, am a tornado in the kitchen, leaving evidence of my machinations—a smear of yogurt on the fridge handle, spatters of butter across the stove—everywhere, try as I might to be better each time. Perfect mise en place is a pipe dream I’ll have forever, and anyway: we all need our white whales.
The worst offender, it should come as a surprise to no one who knows me and my sweet tooth, is a chocolate cake recipe. Coined “Emma’s Favorite Devil’s Food Cake” by my dad in the cookbook, the recipe is actually a faithful reproduction of Kathleen’s Devil’s Food Cake from The New Basics Cookbook. Who is Kathleen? I’ve never known, never gave it a passing thought, not until research for this essay (i.e. a quick google) led to my discovery that Kathleen King, heretofore known to me as queen of cake recipes, is known more famously as the founder of Tate’s Bakeshop. I knew I liked those cookies for a reason.
In some ways, Kathleen and I are cut from the same cloth: as a kid, she baked and sold cookies at her family farm stand on Long Island. As a kid, I baked and sold cookies at a table set up under the FDR Drive, across the street from my building. But this is where the similarities end: while Kathleen sold Tate’s Cookies for $500 million in 2018, I am now at the point in my life where it would probably be rude to charge my neighbors 25 cents for a cookie, even if it was home baked from scratch.
But I still have the cake, which, per family tradition, is a necessary component of most birthdays and special occasions. The baking used to fall to my mom, but at least a decade ago, after years of apprenticeship, I took up the mantle. I care so fiercely for this recipe—find the process so soothing—that I’ve happily made it for my own birthday. This past year, friends hovered anxiously in my kitchen, asking if they could help, but I demurred. By now it’s ritual, rote, the process pocketed with deep sensory memory of being young and having a whole week made better by an afternoon baking a cake with my mom.
We’ve doubled the recipe for big parties. On the opposite page from the main recipe, my ten-year-old scrawl (I type, defensively, as if my handwriting has improved at all with time) painstakingly calculated a 1.5x. This specific scaling had to have led to issues. 4.5 eggs? Sure.
You begin with unsweetened chocolate, melted in a double boiler if you’re fancy and gentle, which I’m not. I’ve certainly burned the chocolate once or thrice before, but I’ve never noticed the difference. Dry ingredients are combined in alternating stages with wet—the recipe calls for three stages, but I’ve never understood: does that mean three stages each of the dry and of the wet? Or three total? People say baking is a science but I’ve made this recipe in various imprecise ways for years and the only faux pas that seems to affect the taste is slight overcooking—give me underdone cake over dry and chalky, any day.
The only major modification came about as a fluke, years ago. Traditionally, Kathleen calls for buttermilk. Stuck without it once, and already halfway through the process, we had to improvise. This might have been before Google, might have involved a question posed to Ask Jeeves: What can I substitute buttermilk with in baking? Sour cream won out and, because it ultimately seemed to actually produce better results than buttermilk, sour cream stuck around. Anyway, it’s a far more versatile ingredient, one you probably already have in your fridge.
Bafflingly, the last ingredient added before sliding the cake into the oven is a cup of boiling water. Maybe this isn’t baffling at all; maybe this is a normal baking step, but The Great British Bake Off stresses me out more than soothes me, and so I may never know the expert tricks of the trade.
Of course, I’ve been leading to the true star of the show: we all know, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, that the cake is merely a vessel for the frosting. Kathleen can’t take credit for this part, but my great-grandmother can. It was her recipe, and the lure of this frosting is powerful generations later. According to my mom, every time she’d made the recipe as cupcakes for a class or party when we were in school, parents would inevitably come up to her and ask, what was that frosting? It was all my kid would talk about.
The recipe is simple. Powdered sugar, unsweetened chocolate, milk, butter and vanilla. I often wing the ratios of the ingredients; frosting can be fickle, its texture so dependent on the temperature, the humidity, the speed of the beaters, etc. But, like egg whites shapeshifting into meringue, if you’re patient, the frosting will transform. It’s ready when it’s a glossy, chestnut brown, spreading easily but holding its shape. Copious taste testing is key, because really, it’s ready when it’s delicious—that’s the most important part.
I last made this cake for my mom’s birthday. We were so lucky to get to celebrate as a family, and it felt nearly cathartic that, in a year of so many things going wrong, the cake came out perfectly moist, without a crack and blemish-free. The frosting was perfect. No candles in the house, so I gently lay some lit tea lights and cherries on top. My mom was born on the Fourth of July, and while you might expect a more festive dessert for the season—strawberry shortcake, stone fruit pie—we (I?) hold firm every year: Devil’s Food Cake. It’s not a real birthday without the best cake. And, in the comfort food hall of fame, this cake sit leagues ahead of anything else.
Donations time: Last month, $95 went to The Okra Project. You can sign up to become a donor for $5 a month or $30 a year here. This month, donations will go to the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund, which is run by Yee Ha'oolniidoo, an organization providing food and supplies to a community that has been extremely hard hit by the pandemic.