Cake and Eat It, Too

Like most kids, my first interest in recipes was cookie-oriented.  It didn’t take long, however, for me to graduate to cakes – specifically to chocolate cake.  There’s something about chocolate cake that is unequivocally celebratory, especially if it is a two (or more!) layered, frosted cake.  Naturally, even with five birthdays in the house, bunched together in the winter months, this was not enough cake-making opportunities to satisfy a couple of fledgling bakers with a tall can of cocoa powder. 

We turned, therefore, to the cupcake as a far more casual sort of baking that could be used for even the most flimsy of holiday excuses.  I remember making Valentine’s cupcakes with pink iced hearts, and St. Patrick’s cupcakes with green-tinted icing (sometimes flavoured with mint).  Chocolate cupcakes proliferated with such wild abandon that in retrospect I am surprised that a moratorium was not declared.  If the recipe had made more than twelve at a time, it probably would have been banned, eventually. 

I learned a lot about cooking and no small amount about myself, making endless chocolate cupcakes.  I learned that, no matter how eagerly you are looking forward to the final result, you can’t bake them at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time.  I learned that some things just can’t be substituted, but others can if you think the science through.  I learned that it’s not a good idea to daydream while using hand-held electric mixers.  I learned that, while naturally impatient, I’m willing to wait for something really good. 

This was just the chocolate cake; there were other, more casual cakes that awaited overzealous mixing and inappropriately sized baking pans. Economical Spice Cake was a frequent flyer, trading heavily on the idea that a cake with “economical” in the name wouldn’t indicate decadence on the part of the young cook who – after all – was merely looking for a chance to exercise her relatively new baking skills.  Also, since it didn’t require eggs or milk, there was a genuine sense of frugality about the recipe that the flavour of cinnamon and raisins or currants more than compensated for.  Economical recipes made me feel as though I were contributing to the smart use of available resources, while still managing to eat cake. 

I don’t know where the Economical Spice Cake recipe originated.  Google reveals nothing, but a careful examination of recipes on web sites designed for or by the frugal shows endless variations on War Cake, which seems to be constructed on the same principles.  I don’t know if my mother merely changed the name to something a little less depressing, or if that is how it was when she found it. 

I remember another cake, made with oatmeal and topped with a coconut mixture before the whole thing was popped under the broiler for a sort of broiled-on icing effect.  This was probably the thing in our house that most resembled coffee cake, so much so that I eventually developed a coffee cake recipe variation that used a similar effect.  Looking back, we used a surprising amount of coconut in our casual baking, without making anything that was purposefully coconut flavoured.  The number one cookie in the house for years, the undisputed king, was the formidable yet blobbish in appearance Oatmeal Coconut Cookie which could be festooned with raisins or chocolate chips (or carob!) as the baker desired. 

We messed around with various other cakes – experimenting with carrot cake, invariably over-sweet or densely soggy – an assortment of one-off efforts from various magazines or friends or family, but we always returned to the chocolate cake.  My mother considered the Chocolate Zucchini Cake, baked in a bundt pan, a crowning achievement. 

I could probably devote an entire section of this web site to the ways my mother processed zucchini for consumption – the obvious being stir-fried, stuffed, made into relish, layered in casseroles, or inevitably soup – but the two that won her the most personal satisfaction was a tediously constructed lemon spread that was much like a loose-textured lemon curd whose body almost entirely consisted of peeled zucchini, and the bundt cake. 

The need to disguise zucchini was not that we didn’t like it – as vegetables went, it was fairly successful with us kids – but that in the height of the season there were just so darn many of them, and they didn’t freeze very well so we were obliged to find ways to eat them in season or risk being wasteful.  However well liked a vegetable might be, an excess is always going to feel tedious eventually.  The thing about the bundt cake was, that there was no way to possibly tell that it harboured zucchini.  Occasionally, just for giggles, she would add orange-flavoured chocolate chips and drizzle the whole thing with a little chocolate sauce, not minding for a moment the subterfuge of hiding tiresome vegetables in something that was always met with a happy cry.   

I should probably count chocolate cake as one of my comfort foods, with the caveat that not any chocolate cake will do.  Ultra-light, foam-textured supermarket cakes simply do not do the trick, and they are almost inevitably over-frosted with sticky, sweet icing.  Nor do the lead-bellied mile-high constructions of a local dessert chain fit the bill, being both too rich in the unpleasantly fatty sense of the word, but also threatening an indigestability about on par with cedar planks.

Through all the variations, though, it always came back to a simple Devil’s Food Cake recipe, which could be dressed up for a birthday, in frosted layers, dressed down for a minor holiday, in cupcake form, or simply baked plain in a pan and eaten bare for the simple pleasure of a little chocolate snack.  It is this recipe, made with cocoa powder and vegetable oil and a moderate amount of sugar that I turn to over and over.  At one point, in a frenzy of lightened cooking, I ran the ingredients through an online ingredient calculator which determined the fat calories to be only slightly over the 30%.  35%, if I recall.  I experimented, and discovered that I could substitute half of the vegetable oil for applesauce without deleterious effects.  This brought the overall ratio down to a respectable 28% which meant that it now fit into the category of (relatively) healthy snack food to pack for lunches.

The last piece of the puzzle was the name.  It just didn’t seem appropriate to call it Devil’s Food Cake any longer so, after much deliberations and weighing options that included Lesser Imp Cake and Devil May Care Cake, I eventually settled on Devil Fooled Cake.

Sometimes, I still make it into cupcakes.