Monday, August 25, 2008

Grandmama's Chocolate Layer Cake

A small disclaimer. I know the cake is ugly. It's lopsided. It's got some weird cliff effect going on. The sides of the cake aren't really iced all the way. But, it tastes GREAT! And, sad to say, this is one of the prettier cakes I ever made. It's not split down the center or anything and from a few angles it almost looks straight. If I were a cake decorator all of my cakes would end up on Cake Wrecks.


Enough of a disclaimer - - this is Grandmama's Layer cake that I ate whenever we journeyed to South Carolina when I was a child. She always had a cake under the cake plate (the same cake plate that now sits in my kitchen) - and it was either a pound cake or a layer cake 99% of the time.


I made the layer cake for my Bible Study ladies tonight and if there's anything left after that it'll be taking a trip to the teacher's lunch room at work tomorrow for them to finish it off. (With a slice reserved in the freezer for my mother of course).

For the cake part - Duncan Hines butter/yellow cake mix. Cool Completely - slice each layer in half so that you have four layers total.

Icing: Melt 1 stick of butter and 1/2 cup of milk.

Sift together two cups of sugar, 1 TBS flour, and 1/4 cup cocoa. Add to melted butter and milk.


Cook over medium-high heat and boil hard for 3 minutes.


Remove from heat. Stir in one tsp vanilla and one tub of milk chocolate icing. Allow to set until slightly thickened (still pourable).

Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your cake plate. Put one layer of the cake on the cake plate. Pour icing over cake and spread to the edges






Repeat with all layers. Drizzle icing down the side and use a spatula to smooth over the edges. Icing will pool down to the bottom - use your spatula to spread this back up the sides of the cake.





Once covered - allow icing to cool and harden.


Trim off the excess parchment paper with the icing mess to make your cake a bit more presentable (and hopefully yours is not lopsided)





Enjoy with a class of cold milk or a hot cup of coffee!

5 comments:

  1. I love a chocolate layer cake. Looks fantastic!

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  2. OMG...I now WANT chocolate cake. That looks divine. I'm sure your bible study ladies loved it. I'm quite jealous actually....but I'll get over it. ;-)

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  3. Today I baked a whipping cream pound cake for Mr. Lokey's birthday tomorrow. Does that make sense? Anyhow, I normally spray the tube pan with liberal amounts of Pam non-stick cooking spray. For some reason, I decided to follow my late grandmother's recipe's directions literally: coat the pan with butter and flour. Well, I wished I had used the Pam or Baker's Joy, because the beautifully golden-brown crust is now missing significant portions; the cake did not want to release, so I had to force it. I am not happy.

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  4. Joe - oh no! and with pound cake there is no icing to mask the flaws. I usually use crisco and flour and it works really well. It'll still taste great I'm sure.

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