Do you remember long ago, when I posted a venting post about the Crazy Cake that is so beloved in Paul’s family? It is a Depression Era cake, and so it contains no eggs, no butter, and only one tablespoon of baking cocoa per entire layer of “chocolate” cake. (Those quotation marks are just as bitchy as you imagine.)
Trust me that I know and understand that a Beloved Family Recipe can taste DELICIOUS to a person, even if it has no butter and no eggs and features a Depression-Era skimp on cocoa. (And of course it is LOVELY to have a cake option like this if you are looking for a dairy/egg-free cake for allergy reasons, though I’d advise DRAMATICALLY INCREASING the cocoa.) We have similar recipes in my own family, including a cherished delight that has come down through the generations and is nothing more than pork sausage seasoned with salt and pepper and baked into rolls of white bread dough, then dipped into ketchup; this is our HUGE SPECIAL OCCASION meal. We also have a green Jell-o salad that has cottage cheese in it, so please don’t think I don’t understand sentimental family recipes.
But I also understand that my sentimental family recipes are not OBJECTIVELY good to people who didn’t grow up with them and so have neither the “family” nor the “sentimental” elements. I expect Paul to eat the white-bread-wrapped sausage rolls on my family’s special occasions, but I don’t expect him to talk about how AMAZING and EXCEPTIONAL the recipe is, which is what his family does about this cake. It’s so MOIST! It’s so DELICIOUS! It’s the BEST CAKE EVER! Not like those inferior “BOX” mixes! (They say their quotes all bitchy-like, too.)
So if this cake is cherished to you because of you grew up with it and your grandma baked it whenever you visited or whatever, and your family always brings it out on special occasions, I DO get where you are coming from. But I think in order to discuss the cake further, we need to remember and agree that it is a DEPRESSION ERA cake. It was meant to substitute for the real thing when essential ingredients were not available. It’s like a diet recipe that uses fat-free “cream” and artificial sweetener and cottage cheese and applesauce to simulate a dessert. It is a MAKE-DO dessert, a SURVIVAL dessert. We now have ACCESS to the butter and eggs and cream and sugar and cocoa, so GOD KNOWS why we would continue to make do with the survival cake. On the other hand, I now have the option to eat filet mignon on Christmas Eve but I would greatly prefer my salt/pepper sausage wrapped in white bread and dipped in ketchup, and I would resent any attempts to tell me the filet mignon was “better,” so I DO get it. (But if our recipe had been made from inferior ingredients during the Depression, like suet and tongue-end mixed with stale bread crumbs to simulate meat, you can bet I’d substitute the better ingredients now that we had them, rather than preserving The Original Recipe.)
In short, I have feelings and opinions about this cake, and yet I am committed to making this cake for Paul every year on his birthday, and I am committed to doing it with as good an attitude as I can muster: I will tell YOU how frustrating I find it, but I will not vent to HIM. (Much.) (Anymore.) And also, I have a certain percentage of self-identity invested in my baking, and food/gifts are my love language, and so I want it to be as good as possible: I take no pleasure (very little pleasure) in having it come out terrible. I have re-copied his mother’s recipe onto my own index card in my own handwriting, to reduce the resentment I feel and hopefully improve the results by not making me feel as if her grating, critical, bossy voice is in my ear. I have committed to NOT trying to substitute butter/eggs/etc. to make it taste “better,” remembering that I would not want Paul to substitute any ingredients in one of my cherished family recipes, if he ever made one of my cherished family recipes for me.
But here is the thing: for at least the last half-dozen years, and possibly longer, the cake has come out IMPOSSIBLY BADLY. It NEVER came out of the pan easily, but it used to come out in no more than two to three pieces per layer, and I could paste those together with frosting and resentment—but the last half-dozen years, it has had to be SPOONED out of the pan in chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say I have cried and screamed, literally cried and screamed, after carefully carefully carefully applying Crisco and flour to the cake pans, carefully following the recipe, and still getting oily pale-brown chunks that can’t be formed into a cake. Paul has had to spend more than one Birthday Eve reassuring me that it’s okay and it doesn’t matter and that he’ll have something else as his birthday dessert, and no one should have to do that on their Birthday Eve and/or on the topic of their once-per-year special sentimental dessert. THIS CANNOT CONTINUE.
Here is where you come in, I HOPE: If you make this recipe as a Cherished Family Cake and you like it, can you tell me anything you do that HAS to be done to make it come out right? Maybe I copied it wrong from my mother-in-law’s stupid picky bossy recipe card. Or maybe it literally requires two tablespoons of actual vanilla extract (that’s the same as the amount of cocoa), at the current non-Depression-Era price of roughly six dollars, and maybe everything is going wrong because I substituted imitation vanilla or because I made the assumption that 2 T. was a transcription error and it should have been 2 t. Maybe my attempt to add more cocoa is the problem, though I have tried going back to the original two tablespoons, with no improvement. Maybe there was an instruction about removal-from-the-pans that I thought I could do without. Or maybe when I rolled my eyes at instructions such as “Beat exactly two minutes BY THE CLOCK!!!!,” I was rolling my eyes at actual essential elements of the magic spell. I may have worked in a bakery, but that doesn’t mean I understand MAGICAL SPELLS. I will accept the magical spell from YOUR family’s recipe, even as I resisted it from Paul’s family recipe. I will accept YOUR gentle guidance even though I rejected Paul’s mother’s bossy fist. (Gah, that woman was the WORST with recipes. All of them were either “Oh, I don’t really use measurements or instructions” with a merry little laugh, or else SUPER DUPER EXCESSIVELY PICKY AND DETAILED WITH LOTS OF ALL-CAPS.)
And I’m not above some fussy prissiness in a recipe. When I was on Weight Watchers, if you had told me I needed to whip a mixture for two full minutes, or use the fat-free sugar-free version of an item, or use ground oatmeal instead of flour, I would absolutely have done it without blinking or flinching. And now that I’m on keto, if you told me to use a particular kind of meat, or use more butter, or use a specific weird expensive sugar substitute, I would be similarly all-in. “Doing it the right way” is not a problem as long as it is not my mother-in-law telling me what is right. (And if you’ve never had a single problem and it’s the easiest/best cake in the world and you don’t know what I could be talking about, you know that’s not helpful and you can keep it.)
Follow-up: After writing this post, I impulsively decided to make the cake in a no-birthday-pressure environment, just to see what happened, and maybe to get some good photos of it sticking to the pan. And instead it came out beautifully, and did not fall apart into any chunks. Here are the things I did that may or may not have been important:
• A wet-ingredients bowl and a dry-ingredients bowl, and not combining until the last minute. Which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.
• Then mixing them for EXACTLY TWO MINUTES BY THE CLOCK (with one pause to scrape the bowl), which I have done before, because see also: really trying to get this right, even if it means allowing end results to take priority over irritations and resentments.
• Letting the cakes cool for 15 minutes, then using a soft spatula to go around the edges before de-panning, which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.
• I did, however, QUADRUPLE the cocoa powder, because 1 T. per cake layer is nothing more than FOOD COLORING. Even a QUADRUPLE amount is not really enough, but I don’t want to ruin Paul’s childhood memories. But I have increased the cocoa before without him noticing/minding.
Second follow-up: Wait. Wait wait wait. THE OVEN. Our oven was gradually failing for a number of years, then we recently replaced it, but then we moved so I never tried the cake in the new oven. The new house has an oven that we have noticed is very good: some things that were troublesome to bake before are now non-troublesome. And “oven” is the only answer I can think of that explains why I USED to be able to make the cake come out right, but then couldn’t anymore.