An Ode to the Ooey-Gooey Chocolate Cake of Summer - No. 13
Texas Sheet Cake!
This week I unveiled my long awaited book cover. It was just what I was hoping for - chocolate icing dripping down a drop-dead gorgeous but insanely easy chocolate cake.
That box mix cake perched high on the marble stand garnished with sugared berries and kumquats is unapologetic and meaningful as my follow-up to the Cake Mix Doctor releases this November. It says - if a cake could talk! - I am delicious and inexpensive and easy and accessible, so everyone just get over the fact that I’m made with a mix.
And that frosting, icing, whatever you call the velvety chocolate fudge goo cascading down the cake, it is simply ganache. The icing on the cake. It is simple and from-scratch, poured casually, not perfectly or planned, letting the unscripted drips and dribbles fall as they may. Which I find beautiful.
A magical chocolate saucepan icing holds up to the heat
Cakes and icings and baking are what I am known for, and I have written everything from a cake mix book to one diving into the history of American scratch cake. But on a deeper level this chocolate cover cake reminds me of myself and how I bake now. My kids are grown so I no longer have to use a cake mix to save time, but I am still looking for good shortcuts, beautiful ways to present, and maximum flavor in minimum time. Use a cake mix if you like but always make your frosting from scratch. Let me tell you about another frosting that takes ordinary cake to extraordinary places. My mom’s chocolate fudge icing. It’s magical.
My mother was a wonderful cook and simply cooked what she liked to eat. Chocolate fudge icing was a favorite.
The memory of her stirring milk, sugar, butter, and cocoa in a pan on the stove is imprinted in my mind. She stirred with her right hand, and placed her left hand on her hip for some reason. I guess it balances if you to stir this way? And it’s funny because her sisters did the same, and I have found myself stirring sauces with hand on hip…
Her icing recipe used to be made with granulated sugar. It had to be stirred gently and brought up to a soft ball stage - where a teaspoon of hot icing is dropped into a cold glass of water and forms a ball when the icing is ready to pour. We didn’t use candy thermometers like we do today. We used our eyes.
Shortcut the icing with powdered sugar
But when we went off to college, my mother took off her apron. She no longer fried chicken. She turned the den into the dining room and then turned it back into a den, things mothers do when they finally have the house to themselves. And she shortcut the icing prep by switching the white sugar to confectioners’.
No longer did she have to stir that icing long enough for the sugar to dissolve. No longer did we have to be warned to not scrape the sides of the pan because it will make the icing grainy. Powdered sugar came into the picture and everyone softly exhaled.
Caramel icing and fudge icing could still be made from scratch, but effortlessly. With your eyes closed.
Texas sheet cake is a summer classic
One reason cakes enrobed with caramel or fudge icing are so popular in states like Tennessee and Mississippi and Texas is the heat and humidity. Just try to take a buttercream-frosted cake to a picnic in Jackson or Houston in the summertime. That icing will roll off the cake before you serve the first slice. So good cooks learned the secret to serving cakes in the summer was frosting them with a pan icing like my mother made. The icing was spread onto the cake warm and set up so hard that cake didn’t budge. Pan icings and hair spray have saved many a Southern woman!