Taste Odyssey #4 - Chocolate Cavity Maker Cake

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chocolate-cavity-maker-cake/detail.aspx

This cake is ridiculously processed compared to the recipes I tend to favor, but the sound of it was too good to pass up.  I'm glad I bent my rules a little for this one because it is so decadent it ought to have a poetry reading at a salon.  I just checked and this is my first use of the word decadent, soon you will understand why.

Another experience in being a guy who is getting the hang of baking in this week's installment.  Did you know that a Bundt cake pan is the same thing as a fluted cake pan?  That makes one of us; definitely not this poor dimwitted chef who spent far too long scrutinizing every pan at Wal-Mart before fighting off my most base perfectionist desires and just grabbing the damn pan that looked pretty close to what I was looking for.  Turns out it was exactly what I was looking for, but now nobody else has to suffer as I have suffered.  Until they try to flour the pan.  See the first recipe entry for details on flouring if you want the refresher course, but let me tell you that flouring a fluted cake pan is a hell of an exercise.

Back to the ingredients.  You're in trouble with food sensitivities right out of the gate on this one.  Betty Crocker doesn't give a rat's ass if you can't handle your gluten; that xanthan gum is a potential landmine for some people.  It is way down on the ingredients list and it didn't hurt my wife either of the two times she had it, but you are warned.

Otherwise the list is fine - I chose Kahlua for the coffee liqueur and it was perfect.  Your sampler bottle is going to give you enough booze for roughly 1.8 of these cakes, luckily I had some extra mini-bottles around to top up the second attempt.

That brings me to another interesting point; I made this cake twice on two subsequent weekends but both times it was different and I think that both versions had their merits.  I made the first cake with mint chocolate chips, as I read that the mint really set it off.  Now, the alteration suggested using a package of crushed Andes mints, which I can't get in Canada.  I replaced them with mint Chipits and I have a hunch that these were a bit stronger than the Andes would have been (you can really taste the pack llama and Sherpa!).  If you don't mind a strong taste of mint I think the cake works really well as a chocolate mint cake, but it is going to overwhelm a little.

The second cake was straight semi-sweet chocolate chips and it was amazing.  That is all.  Look, it's all chocolate, you can't really mess that up, I'm just saying that I liked the mint as well.  Oh, you don't need to ice this beauty in any way, shape, or form, it's already rich enough without.  That being said?  I totally did that.  I defrosted the leftover icing from the Skor bar squares and put it to good use.  Sure you don't need to ice it, but you should WANT to.



One thing these photos do not properly convey is the sheer heft of the cake.  The batter is very thick and the cake comes out very heavy.  It's surprisingly moist and delicious, so clearly the additional weight is from the caloric content.

Taste Odyssey #2 - Skor Bar Squares w/Allegedly Vanilla Icing

Recipe: http://www.grouprecipes.com/6489/awesome-skor-squares.html
Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/creamy_vanilla_frosting.php

I look forward to going to once-a-week posting once I finally catch up to my current experiments in baked goods, but for now you can enjoy as I keep pushing through my check list of culinary conquests.

Important Cross-Border Cooking Clarification - Skor Bars are a chocolate-coated toffee confection that tastes like delicious.  The closest American equivalent for this recipe are Heath Bars.  If they do not sell chips of this product, please don't look too hard at how awesome this recipe is.

Compared to the diabolical complexity of the whole carrot cake experiment, this proved to be a very, very easy follow-up.  On the Superman Scale of Dessert Complexity, the carrot cake was easily a Lex Luthor master plan whereas this one was more like a guy named Doug trying to get out of paying his bar tab. 

This recipe was born from my desire to recreate a similar one that my mother had made some years prior, but I didn't really feel like asking for what she used.  My whole thing here is exploring and trying to learn something, so I went hunting for something that sounded about right and made it.  Undoubtedly the simplest recipe I have attempted so far; the hardest part was getting the icing made. In fact, I whipped up two pans of these in the same time it took to do the carrot cake, if not less.

First off, in terms of ingredients, the only thing that was slightly sketchy here were the Ritz crackers.  You'd be amazed what they hide in food packaging labels and I was still a bit worried after I vetted them that rogue MSG could be lying in wait.  Turns out that this is not the case, I am happy to report.  Icing was a different story; your laboratory bred can of pre-made frosting is a quick and easy fix but it has a list of chemicals that wouldn't sound out of place on a package labelled "Penzoil" let alone "Duncan Hines" and I do not trust them.

But, let's start at the beginning.  Undoubtedly the most enjoyable part of this recipe is the crumbing of the Ritz crackers.  Simple and fast way to do this?  Punch a small hole in the side of the bag, let the air out.  Next grab your rolling pin and just start beating the holy hell out of the crackers.  After you revel in the vicarious thrill of this for a bit, get down to actual business and start rolling the pin over the bag.  The crumbing really depends on your level of devotion to the definition of the term.  I almost want to say that the first bag that had bigger bits in it turned out slightly better but both of them were delicious so it's a matter of preference.

Oh, and this is going to sound utterly dim, but when the recipe calls for condensed milk, they mean sweetened condensed milk.  Which I'm sure for many people is a bit of a 'duh' moment, but I was looking around for quite some time, vainly seeking milk that was just condensed before realizing that such a beast does not exist.

As I say, that was the easy part.  Next came the icing.  You'll notice the term 'Allegedly' up there in the title because it tasted great but the vanilla was probably not as mixed in as it should have been.  Totally my fault, so your results may vary, though it could be that the small amount of vanilla used is overwhelmed by everything else.  I did like this recipe because the icing was amazing, natural, and it made an insane amount.  I can confirm that leftover icing (and there's plenty to frost two pans of this stuff plus a ton extra) will freeze just fine and can be easily thawed out and applied later with no harm to its sugary goodness.

Big food warning regarding the whipping cream though.  I highly recommend coughing up the extra couple bucks for the all-natural stuff (Farm Boy carries it up here, I have heard Trader Joe's has similar in the States).  Your average dairy has thickened its whipping cream with a product on the label called carageenan.  It is a natural food thickener that's found in just about everything that you can imagine needs thickener (and some things that don't need thickener where apparently they toss it in just for the hell of it) because it's cheap.  It is also known to cause stomach issues in sensitive people, particularly those with IBS, and it can cause MSG-related reactions.  So if you know somebody sensitive to MSG, the whipping cream will turn your icing into something just as potentially problematic as the store-bought kind.  Since I know people with both issues, big no-no.

All potential problems avoided, however, and you have an incredibly rich and easy dessert.  Very tasty for a very minimal amount of effort.  Pardon the blurry picture but I did get better with the camera as I went.  Oddly enough the inside of our fridge is not an optimal photo studio.  Until next time, insert witty cooking catchphrase here!