The other day I was thinking about chocolate cake (I mean, why wouldn’t I be??) and I realized I’d never made chocolate cake from scratch. I know, CRAZY, right? I didn’t really trust the internet to give me a reputable recipe, so I did what any modern woman would do: I asked my mom for hers.
The thing about my mom and baking is that she doesn’t really do recipes; in her own words she does “lumps of this and sploshes of that,” so when she did send me her recipe I had to do some adjustments and calculations, partly because I needed to halve the recipe to make jar cakes, and partly because I don’t know how much “1/2 package ground almonds (those leetle red and black packages from the supermarket)” actually is. In the end all my calculations must have been correct, because this cake is aaaaaawesome, super chocolatey and moist and fluffy.
Now, while I managed to figure out the cake recipe, unfortunately my frosting turned out total crap. The first batch was gritty and the second was oozy, so I ended up using some canned stuff from the store, which I’m not really thrilled about. If anyone has a foolproof recipe for chocolate buttercream, please send it my way.
Tanie & her Mom’s Chocolate Cake in a Jar
ingredients:
¾ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¾ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup butter (room temperature)
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
¼ cup ground almonds
1 tbsp milk
½ tsp vanilla
Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray the inside of ten 4-oz jars with nonstick cooking spray.
Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.
Melt chocolate chips, either in a double boiler or microwave (my mom says to be careful if using a microwave as she once melted a bowl doing this O__O ). Set aside and allow to cool slightly.
In a mixer, beat together butter and sugar. Add ground almonds, then the eggs one at a time.
Add vanilla and milk to melted chocolate and mix with a fork or small whisk.
Add chocolate mixture to butter mixture and mix well (mine went sort of lumpy for a hot minute but in the end it was nice and smooth).
Fold in flour mixture.
Spoon batter into jars, filling to about ⅔. Wipe any batter off the outside of the jars and place in a shallow baking dish with about ¼” of water in the bottom.
Bake for 30-40 minutes (mine took 33 minutes).
Once cakes are fully cooked (the tops should spring back when pressed lightly), remove the jars from the oven & dish and allow to cool completely. Once cooled, if the batter has risen into the mouth of the jar, you can either scoop the top of the cake out, or gently squish it down into the jar before icing (I did the latter).
Now for the taste test:
“It’s good!”
“Really good.”
“Are you done yet?”
Hey there! 🙂 I’ve been lurking about for months, and never had the gumption to comment until now. I loooooooove your blog, now that that’s out of the way:
I work in activities in a nursing home, and we do a lot of cooking classes with the old people. I once was following a recipe that said to microwave the chocolate chips for 1 minute, stir, and heat longer if they weren’t smooth. I put them in a bowl, popped them in the microwave and set it for a minute.
I opened the door and a whole heck of a lot of smoke came billowing out and immediately set off the fire alarm. The chips had melted into the bowl and the plastic was scorched! When the fire alarm goes off at work, they alert the fire dept to the fact it’s only a drill and not to suit up and come save us. Also, we always just assume it’s a drill since there’s never been a real fire. So of course this was unscheduled, and the fire dept showed up, and everyone was freaking out and running down to where we were with fire extinguishers!! Then one of the firemen came down to the room to make sure everything was ok.. After hearing what happened, he told us to have a nice day and then he radioed to someone ‘False alarm, just a failed cooking class at the Village’.
I WAS SO EMBARASSED!!!
Hahahaha oh no!! My ex did this once while cooking porkchops- he used some whack-a-doo recipe that said to coat them with oil and put them as close to the broiler as possible. Of course, the oil heat up and spattered on the broiler, smoke started billowing everywhere which set of the smoke detectors, which set off the fire alarm for our whole building, which made all our neighbors evacuate and the fire department come. He was totally humiliated.
I have a chocolate buttercream recipe, but I can’t remember the last time I tried it and don’t want to give you a potentially flawed recipe. So, here’s a tried-and-true one for dark chocolate buttercream.
Dark Chocolate Frosting
From Beantown Baker
Ingredients
6 Tbsp butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups powdered sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/3 cup milk
Directions
1. Cream butter and vanilla.
2. In a separate bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa powder. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture.
3. Slowly add milk until frosting reaches desired consistency, then beat another 5 minutes until creamy.