Birthday season has already started in the Plair household.
Maybe your household doesn’t have a birthday “season,” but with two kids’ birthdays in September and two adults’ birthdays in October, ours certainly does … and that season is autumn.
Things are a little easier now that the schools require store-bought treats. Gone are the days of making monkey-faced cupcakes for the classroom celebration and a chocolate cake for the day-of celebration and a rainbow cake for a birthday party.
These days, the older two are usually happy with this simple chocolate cake recipe.
I’m thankful for that, too, because I almost always have the ingredients for it on hand and the time to pull it off. It’s easy enough that my youngest can help make it, and it only requires one bowl.
I first tried it as an adult, although my mom assures me that it’s the same recipe her own mother used for birthday cakes for generations. Every time we make this cake and its accompanying chocolate frosting, my mom recounts the way her mother would smear the leftover icing between two graham crackers to make a special treat.
“We didn’t have things like Oreos when I was growing up,” she says. “Graham crackers and frosting was as close as we came to anything like that.”
I daresay that homemade chocolate icing between a couple graham crackers tastes far better than most commercial cookies, but I’m not sure my kids would agree.
At any rate, I discovered this recipe after I tried probably a dozen different chocolate cake recipes in a quest to find one that was moist and chocolatey. I cannot stand dry, flavorless cake. What a waste of calories!
As it turns out, the answer was both right in front of me and part of my history: the recipes for both the cake and its frosting are right on the back of the Hershey’s box.
Next time you need to make a dessert for your favorite chocolate lover, give this one a try. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Amelia Plair is a mom and high school teacher in Starkville. Email reaches her at [email protected].
HERSHEY’S “PERFECTLY CHOCOLATE” CHOCOLATE CAKE
2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water (or a mix of leftover coffee and boiling water to equal 1 cup)
This cake actually gets better-tasting with time, so feel free to bake and frost it a day or two ahead of time. If you want to make it further in advance than that, wrap each layer tightly in a double layer of plastic wrap and freeze until firm on a baking sheet. Place wrapped cakes in large zippered plastic bags for long-term freezing.
“PERFECTLY CHOCOLATE” CHOCOLATE FROSTING
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
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