Down-Home Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake with Mocha Butter Cream

Returning to blogging is kind of like getting back on a bicycle, and pretty soon I felt the urge to make a chocolate cake. But there were no birthdays, no dinner parties, no occasions of any kind (it is JANUARY after all). Then yesterday we were home, and it was cold and raining, and that seemed reason enough. By the time Lucy called and it was decided that she and the young 'un would come over, a cake for a tea party seemed inevitable.

So I hit the cookbooks to come up with something simple that I could make without leaving the house (i.e. for which I had all the ingredients) and settled upon Rose Beranbaum's (who knew she was K's husband's best friend's aunt?!) Down-Home Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake (who knew recipes could be plagiarized so easily over the internet? actually, I did, because I frequently look for recipes on the internet and find the same ones over and over, with no attribution) (I'm a bit bogged down in Mrs. Beeton these days, as Hughes just spent an entire chapter detailing instance after instance of Mrs. Beeton's plagiarism, with much quotation and long summaries of every book she plagiarized from--but I think we're about to get back to syphilis, which should be more exciting).

The cake was very easy: eight ingredients: mix the wet, mix the dry, add the wet to the dry, mix some more, bake. I love Beranbaum's recipes because she is so specific and explanatory: "beat for one minute to aerate and develop cake's structure."

Then I had to go and make things complicated and decide to ice it with a mocha buttercream. A real buttercream. The kind I've always been scared to make and thus avoided. But this cake was so easy, that I guess I figured I might as well challenge myself. Real buttercream involves sugar syrup and a candy thermometer and an awful lot of eggs and butter. Waiting for the sugar syrup to get to the right temperature (238--soft ball stage) involves patience. It actually turned out fine, with no problems except the anxiety that the candy thermometer had broken because it took about two minutes to hit 200 and then 10 more minutes to inch past 200. And then there's the problem that I realized I don't particularly like buttercream. My god, that stuff is sweet. But the cake shore did look purty.

And how did it taste? Well, there was some divergence in opinion on that one. I thought it was delicious. S and Lucy's daughter liked it. Lucy thought it tasted odd, but ate quite a lot of it in her quest to figure out why it tasted odd, and it seemed to me that she ultimately came around to liking it. M hated it. She said it tasted "rotten." This was not a high point of mother-daughter relations.

To get objective: it has an absolutely perfect texture: moist, light, soft. And it was deliciously chocolatey. And then there was this...taste. You can call it bitterness; you can call it harshness; I suppose, if you are M, you can call it "rotten." Beranbaum says "The extra baking soda also creates the slightly dipped center and the coarse, dark reddish crumb with a deliciously bitter edge," and I guess some people just don't like the bitter edge. But I do.