Fanny Farmer's Mix-in-the-Pan Chocolate Cake

The weather in D.C. was gorgeous this weekend! I spent all day Friday and Saturday reading so that I could play in the 60 degree sunshine yesterday and it was so worth it. My Texas bones needed a little bit of warmer air and sunshine. It was 80 degrees in Houston yesterday -- I know that some people are really offended by warm weather in February but, hey, I grew up with it and I love it. Dudley & I went to Arlington National Cemetery yesterday because he'd never been before and I hadn't been since I moved here. As usual, it was quite moving and inspiring.

Anyway, with all of my reading and sunshine, I didn't spend much time in the kitchen and last night I was struck with a craving for chocolate dessert. Actually, I wasn't hungry at all for dinner, only for dessert. Side note: one of my very favorite things about being an adult is deciding that I don't want dinner, I only want dessert. I love not having to eat all of my dinner before I can move on to the good stuff. Don't stress out though, I try to eat reasonably healthy most of the time. I was pondering several recipes but I'm low on stock ingredients right now and I found this recipe in the Fanny Farmer Baking Book and it looked like it'd be fun to try -- it was fun! It's a chocolate cake that you mix in the pan. It doesn't call for eggs but it does call for vinegar -- how strange? It's not really what I'd call intensely chocolaty, the flavor is more along the lines of Texas Sheet Cake, for those of you who have had that dessert (my MawMaw makes it quite a bit). The recipe calls to dust it with powdered sugar but I wanted to increase the chocolate factor so I made a ganache with the little bit of heavy cream that I had left.

Mix-in-the-Pan Chocolate Cake
From Fannie Farmer Baking Book
Makes one 8" cake

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift together:
1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 c granulated sugar
1/4 c unsweetend cocoa
1/2 tsp salt

3. If you want to unmold your cake, grease and flour your 8" cake pan, otherwise, you can go ahead and dump your dry ingredients in the pan as-is (you'll just cut the pieces out of the pan after the cake is done.

It will look like this in your pan:

4. Meanwhile, get together,
1 tbsp white or cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 salad oil
1 cup of water

5. With the back of a spoon, or your finger, make three small holes in the flour mixture:


6. Pour the vinegar in one hole, the vanilla in another, and the oil in the third hole (my oil didn't really fit into the third hole. Oh well, no worries.)


7. Then pour the cup of water over all of the ingredients.

8. Using a table fork, stir the mixture very well, reaching all over the bottom and the corners of the pan to incorporate the flour (Be careful with this step, every time I thought I had completely mixed it I found another little pocket. The recipe says that it takes about 90 seconds of mixing).


9. Bake the cake for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven. If you're going to unmold it, let it rest for 5 minutes before turning it out onto a rack. Otherwise, let the cake cool completely in the pan.


So, what the cake lacks in chocolate intensity, it makes up for in ease and convenience as well as being super moist and tasty. When I started this blogging thing, I stopped buying any sort of sweet, dessert-ish things at the store. So, when I don't have something that I've made, I have to resort to chocolate chips or fruit. Fruit is good but sometimes chocolate is so much better. I have a feeling that I'll probably be making this again!