Last week, as I was serving my favorite chocolate cake, I remembered that my fascination with chemical reactions began when I was eight. Every Saturday morning, I watched Mr. Wizard explain the science behind ordinary things on our fuzzy black and white television. He said that chemical reactions made cakes rise. I wanted to be a chemist at work in the kitchen. It was time to move on from transforming copper saucepans from dull brown to garish, peachy pink with lemon and salt.

I was ready for more than powering my green plastic boat across the sink with a chemical reaction of baking soda and vinegar. Curdling milk and making my sister cry by adding blue food coloring to her milk were child’s play.

I would become a baker/chemist. Kitchen experiments would be well received if the end results were sweet and tasty. After all, my sister always smiled when she saw a cake. My first cakes began as powder in red and white boxes from the grocery store. I measured water, broke eggs and mixed. Not much chemistry there. I moved onto the more complicated angel food cake mix and enjoyed transforming white powder into fluffy peaks using a primitive, hand operated, eggbeater. That was a bit more fun but I wanted to really make a cake, I wanted to “Start from Scratch!”

The first cake I made from scratch was a Chocolate Wacky Cake. I knew that this was the recipe for me when I read the part about creating a volcano with vinegar and baking soda to give the cake its ‘lift’. I had found a way to have both a chemical reaction and a sweet reward. I branched out and created brownies and pound cakes in my search for even more interesting recipes.

When I was nine, I saw a recipe for a walnut, chocolate chip, date cake in a small cookbook from the grocery store. I had only eaten dates at Christmas time and couldn’t imagine how the cake would taste, but with chocolate chips and walnuts, it sounded delicious and it was. I made it a couple of times before I lost the recipe and moved on to the challenge of perfecting tapioca.

Nearly ten years later, I saw a recipe for a chocolate, date cake in a newspaper column. With minor adjustments, this is the cake I have baked for many parties. I always use a Bundt pan and slather the cooled cake with unsweetened, heavy cream that has been beaten to stiff peaks. Last week, I topped the cream with sliced strawberries and promised our guests that I would share the recipe. Here’s how I did it:
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Last Saturday was a quiet, rainy day. Rain meant no farmers’ market for me.

It was a perfect day to work on the  unfinished painting waiting on the easel in my studio. When I saw our six tree orchard in the painting I wondered if our apples were ripe. From previous owners I knew the orchard had been a source of apples at least since the 1940’s when growing fruit and vegetables was a patriot effort. I walked to the orchard in the rain and came home with a basket filled with fragrant fresh apples from the old trees.

What could be more fitting, then, than to look for a recipe in the 1930 edition of the Chicago Daily News Cook Book that had belonged to my mother-in-law?

In the section titled Cakes and Cookies I found a recipe handwritten on grease stained piece of brown paper. Although, I had been planning to make an apple pie this very short recipe titled “Crumb Cake with Fruit” was intriguing. It read, “Use fingers to mix together one and a half cups flour, half a cup sugar, half a cup butter, and a pinch salt. Add spice. Save three-quarters cup of crumbs. Put rest into bottom of pan. Put sweetened fruit on top. Sprinkle rest of crumbs around. Bake until golden.”

Pretty simple. But how big a pan, how long should it bake and at what temperature? I would have to fill in the details. Here’s how I did it.

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Tonight we celebrate Anne’s birthday with a cake.

Strawberries Chocolate Raspberries

Rather than spelling out the details of a two day baking process – I’ll give you the essentials and trust that you will be able to sort out the more mundane elements.

This cake had seven layers, (eight if you count the plate).
Whipped Cream
Berry MousseCake
Berry Mousse
Meringue
Whipped Cream
Cake
Plate

To make two layers of the richest, most dense chocolate cake flavored with expresso, rum, and Callebaut chocolate, I adapted Susan G. Purdy’s recipe for Marvelous Mud Cake from my chocolate spotted edition of her book, A Piece of Cake.

The meringue was made with four egg whites, a quarter of a cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, half a teaspoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of vanilla and cup of sugar mixed with two tablespoons of cornstarch.

It’s a simple process, the egg whites are beaten with the salt and lemon juice until foamy, the quarter of a cup of sugar is beaten in gradually until the egg whites have formed stiff shiny peaks, then the vanilla and sugar/cornstarch is folded in. Using a cake pan I drew a circle on a piece of parchment paper, spread the meringue onto the paper and piped small meringue kisses with the rest.

The meringues baked for two hours at two hundred degrees, and spent the night in the turned off the oven, protected from humid air and any mice passing through the kitchen.

The berry mousse I made was a mixture of raspberries, strawberries, cassis, gelatin and whipped cream. Your favorite recipe will work – it can be as simple as sweetened fruit folded into whipped cream or complicated enough to make Julia Child proud.

In Vermont whipped cream begins with cold, heavy cream, in a glass bottle from a local dairy and is not ultra-pasteurized. The cream is beaten until stiff and that’s it. No sugar, no vanilla, no additions necessary. I used three cups of cream.

The party was a delicious event, the cake remained intact for the drive up the beautiful but rutted dirt road and after an amazing dinner, we tried to dance off calories with songs like Rock Around the Clock.

Happy Birthday Anne!
notes – The cake I made took a lot of time, but there are a number of options that will shorten the time considerably. Make a simple chocolate cake, substitute room temperature coffee or espresso for some or all of the liquid in the recipe, use rum or bourbon to replace a quarter of the liquid required, ask a baker if you can buy a cake without frosting, use softened ice cream flavored with berries or strawberry ice cream instead of mousse and you will have an ice cream cake, no one will know if you decide to leave out the meringue layer. You can use real cream in an aerosol can BUT—-if you use whipped topping the cows, the farmers and I will be very disappointed.

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Baking a fabulous cake is fun. Tonight we celebrate Denise’s birthday at a pot luck dinner with friends.

I’ll bring the cake. When I have finished, the cake will be delicious and beautiful, but at the moment my kitchen looks as if Lucy and Ethel have had yet another disaster.

I’ll post the details of this delight later today, but first I have to tidy up the kitchen before Ricky gets back.

Okay, most of the sugar and coconut is off the counter, there may be some on the floor but I’ll mop after I post the details.  Here’s how I did it. … read more