Birthday Cake

I should probably branch out: this is the third time for the chocolate mayonnaise cake. Since I only make two cakes per year (one for each honyock's birthday), this amounts to a rut.




It's basically the recipe from Joy of Cooking.




Chop and then melt 4 oz unsweetened baker's chocolate






Beat the hell out of:
Three eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1-3/4 cup sugar

Combine 3/4 cup mayonnaise with the melted chocolate, add it to the whipped stuff and beat the hell out of that.




Whisk together two cups of sifted bread flour (measure post-sift) with 2 tsp. of baking soda and 2 tsp. baking powder.

Then add the flour mixture, beating hell out of everything, gradually, alternating with water until the flour mixture and 1-1/3 cups of water has been added.





Beat everything a little more.

Then pour into cake pans: I use non-stick pans but I still spray them with canola oil spray. Can't be too careful, for real.

Bake at 350ºF for 30 minutes or until a toothpick stabbed into the middle of it comes out naked.



Actually, take it out after 30 minutes anyway. I sort of dodged a bullet here, because the toothpick didn't quite come out clean at 30 minutes, so I set the timer for three more minutes, then spaced off and didn't notice the timer going off. I don't know how long the stuff baked, but I do know the cake halves were smaller coming out than they had been at 30 minutes. The cake stayed reasonably moist and edible, but the whole idea with this recipe is MOIST. Joy of Cooking even claims this cake needs no frosting, though really, what are they thinking? All cakes need frosting: that's the purpose of a cake, providing an excuse to eat frosting.




I used two full jars of frosting, actually. I should probably start making my frosting from scratch. The reason I don't buy box cakes is it's more fun to do all this. Plus, it's easy to stop at a skinny slice when you are relieved of denial about what all is in it. Three eggs. Almost two cups of sugar. A heap of mayo. Which is to say calories my 38 year old metabolism doesn't seem to know how to handle like it did back when I thought Reagan was going to draft me and send me to Nicaragua.



Is that the trade-off of wisdom? You get smarter but have to pay for the smarts with getting fat? Maybe I'd prefer to be dumb and skinny.

I was thinking I needed one of those cake savers, though. But why pay $15 or whatever for a Tupperware cake storage deal when you can frost the thing on the lid of a $1 mixing bowl and use the bowl as a cover?