Chocolate Everywhere Cake
Chocolate lovers will be cutting a slice of pure heaven when they taste this dish.
IngredientsMoist Chocolate Cake:
2 cups flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 cup milk
2/3 cup oil
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting:
2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter, softened
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
Chocolate Drizzle:
1 (1-ounce) square unsweetened chocolate
1/4 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Chocolate Garnishes:
1 (1-ounce) square sweetened chocolate
1 teaspoon sweetened or unsweetened cocoa powder
InstructionsPreheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans or one 13 x 9-inch baking pan.
For Moist Chocolate Cake, mix flour, sugar, milk, oil, cocoa powder, eggs, baking soda, vanilla and salt in a large bowl until smooth. Pour into prepared pans. Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool cakes completely.
For Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting, cream the cream cheese and butter until fluffy. Add the cocoa powder and vanilla. Slowly mix in the confectioners’ sugar until the frosting is smooth. Spread over cooled cakes.
To make the Chocolate Drizzle, melt the chocolate and cream in the top of a double boiler until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Serve warm, drizzled over frosted cakes.
To make chocolate curls, use a potato peeler to shave off long pieces of the chocolate bar.
Presentation Idea: Place a slice of cake upright on a dessert plate. Use the chocolate drizzle to make a crisscross pattern over the cake and the center of the plate, leaving the plate’s edges clean. Sprinkle the cocoa powder around the plate’s edges. Top the slice of cake with a few strategically placed chocolate curls.
Serving quantity: Serves 8.
I also get a posting for the word of the day and the history of that word and you guessed it, on one day last week – the word is chocolate. Do you see a theme here? Here’s the scoop on it:
chocolate - podictionary 639 Posted: 08 Nov 2007 11:01 PM CST
For thousands of years in Central and South America natives used the beans of the cacao tree as a kind of food. One of these foods was a drink called xocolatl, a word that meant “bitter water.” If you’ have ever chomped down into a chunk of unsweetened cooking chocolate you’ll know, in part, why this stuff was called bitter. Their drink actually contained other things besides cacao but the Spaniards who learned about the stuff from the natives associated the two words closely enough that there has been confusion ever since. The Spanish were pretty keen on chocolate, so much so that they set up plantations and produced the stuff for Spanish use for 100 years before other parts of Europe figured out what they were up to. Throughout this time chocolate meant exclusively a drink. Chocolate started being added to things like baked goods in the 1600s but it wasn’t until the 1800s that processing of chocolate was advanced enough that the sort of bonbons we might recognize began to become available. Today the market for chocolate is a multibillion dollar international trade. Back in 1664 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary about enjoying chocolate at a coffee house. Over the last decade or more we’ve seen a proliferation of coffee houses that sell fair trade coffee. And now fair trade is being tried for chocolate as well. Something like 40% of the world’s chocolate comes from Ivory Coast in Africa, but this is not a place where stable government and human rights flourish, despite how healthy the cacao trees might be. Clashes between government and rebel forces have been forcing chocolate prices up even as both government and rebels extract their operating funds from the bottom end of the chocolate industry, the cacao growers and harvesters. So next time you get a hankering for that rich and delicious flavor of chocolate, see if you can get your hands on some fair trade chocolate. It’ll make the taste even less bitter.
There now - wasn't that a lot better than reading a rant about what a crappy day I had? Chocolate makes everything better.
