Apologies for going off-topic here…I just wanted to memorialize this someplace!
Well, I had the day off of work and school today, so mostly today I was a lump. When Boe is depressed, it brings me down too, so that’s kind of a major uphill battle times two to have to trudge back into equilibrium. We’re down to our last $5 until Thursday and my car is on fumes, so we are pretty limited food-wise to just what we have in the cupboards and what our imaginations can come up with.
I think I’ve mentioned before that Boe hates cake. HAAAAAAAAATES cake. Granted, working 9 years as a birthday party clown will do that to a person, so I think it’s perfectly understandable. Anyway, you read the bit about being broke, right? Believe it or not, Boe actually craved chocolate cake today…yeah, I was stunned too. But the broke thing made it a bit of a conundrum. So I looked up a chocolate cake recipe that got a bunch of good reviews on Allrecipes.com and substituted a bunch of stuff. The major substitution was using 2 grated tablets of Abuelita (so delicious!) in place of cocoa powder (since we didn’t have any cocoa powder). I also threw an additional 3 tablespoons of cinnamon into the batter, and doubled the amount of vanilla extract. Then I poured the whole shebang into a pan, put it into the oven, set the timer, and hoped for the best.
The fail occurred when the timer went off and I pulled the oven rack toward me to poke the cake with a toothpick. The entire middle was still liquid and sank. Sigh. So I put it back into he oven, set the timer for another 15 minutes, and promptly burst into tears. Boe heard me sniveling in the kitchen and came to check on me…he said that if the texture turned out more like brownies, that was okay, since he loves brownies. I love that man.
So the timer went off again, and the toothpick came out clean, so I pulled the pan out of the oven. My heart sank. It looked like there was a 2-inch border of cake surrounding the sunken crackled center of brownie-textured fail. We cut into it, and Boe popped the first steaming chunk into his mouth. His eyebrows shot to his hairline, and he mumbled something around the cake in his mouth.
“Hoby schrp, of, iss z OON.”
“Huh?”
He popped a second chunk of cake/brownie fail into my mouth. Fail? How could I ever think that this bliss was fail? It was moist, dense, incredibly rich, with a hefty cocoa flavor as a base note, vanilla smoothness in the middle notes, and the cinnamon really shining through at the top of the nose. It’s not sticky-sweet, more like a cross between dark chocolate and semi-sweet. Unlike most chocolate and cocoa based foods, I didn’t desperately want a glass of water to accompany it.
I am SO going to remember this recipe for future use.
stuffedwithlove 