Baby Cakes (and a Recipe!)

Last week one night, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and a baking blogger that I follow had posted a picture of an incredibly gorgeous chocolate cake.  I showed it to my husband and exclaimed that I needed to bake cake more often - we are not enjoying enough cake like this!  Back when I worked at Phillips Exeter Academy a few years ago, I was the self appointed birthday cake baker and I spent many hours pouring over recipes and choosing cake recipes for each of the monthly employee birthdays in my department.  I never made the same cake twice and I always made two or three cakes at a time to bring in.  I would combine all the birthdays that fell in any given month and choose a particular day that would be our Cake Day.  Everybody loved and greatly anticipated cake days and I loved planning for them.  Nowadays, I make cakes just a few times a year.  When there are only two of you at home, making a huge layer cake just doesn't make sense unless you are going to pig out and eat it over a couple of days.  We just can't do that (we really want to but we won't).  So, inspiration struck - baby cakes!  I have a really good recipe that I actually found on the back of Trader Joes baking cocoa and it's called the "Easiest And Greatest Chocolate Cake Ever" or something like that.  I am going to share that recipe with you shortly.  You want this recipe in your file box!

Last Saturday night, I made a batch of the cake batter that I am going to spell out for you and I divided it in to the 9 pans you see above and baked them.  I wrapped them all individually and very tightly and stored them all in the freezer but one of the little ones.  On Sunday, right after church, I made a bowl of rich chocolate ganache and we split one of the baby cakes and layered on ganache and chocolate peanut butter ice cream for our Sunday splurge.  Heaven!  Then, tonight, we had two of our missionaries over for dinner and I thawed out another baby cake and this time I made a chocolate cream cheese frosting and made a wee layer cake sprinkled with mini chocolate chips.  That wee cake was cut in to four tiny pieces for our dessert - perfect.  Now, anytime we crave a bit of cake, we can have one with no leftovers.  I plan on making a few other types of cake batter and bake and freeze them too for variety (though chocolate is the favorite).

Here's the recipe and it truly is easy because you throw all of the ingredients in one huge mixing bowl and beat it all at once - no separating wet and dry although sometimes I do out of habit.  The cake is moist, rich, not too sweet, not too tender but not dense - just right!  It's a perfect devil's food type cake and it makes a ton of batter - more than you would need for a typical two-three layer cake.  If you want cupcakes, it makes 48!  When I make it for a layer cake, once I pour the batter in my pans, I use the leftover batter for however many cupcakes can be made.  For baby cakes, it filled four 4 inch pans and 4 six inch pans and I over filled them so the cakes would be high enough to split in layers themselves.
Typical 9 inch pans bake for 30 minutes; cupcakes and the wee cakes, start at 20 minutes - just keep an eye on the smaller pans and not all ovens perform the same.

Greatest AND Easiest Chocolate Cake (Trader Joe's)

3 1/3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 Tbl baking soda
1 1/3 cups baking cocoa
3 cups buttermilk (don't use regular milk)
2 cups sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 sticks softened butter
1 tsp vanilla
5 eggs
Beat it all together on high (start on low or it will go flying) for 3 minutes.  Grease and flour your pans and bake at preheated 350 degrees.  

On another cooking note, yesterday I made a huge pot of Alphabet Soup for our church Women's meeting; we had a wonderful Grammar Refresher class taught by a high school English teacher and it seemed appropriate.  The soup is made with hamburger, onions, carrots, green beans, corn, peas, beef broth, tomato sauce, and various herbs.  It was pretty tasty and we had leftovers so I served it again tonight to our dinner guests (and the baby cakes).

I meant to get a picture of the dessert - my friend Taryn made large sugar cookies and she frosted them with a delightful green icing and wrote (with icing, very finely) words that we associate with grammar, like noun, adverb, pronoun etc.  Clever and delicious.  I highly recommend a grammar refresher for all of us - you have probably noticed how poorly we speak as a nation, even journalists and writers, and our kids and grandkids are not being taught grammar as thoroughly or consistently like we older folks were.  Forgive me if you ever find a grammar mistake in my blog posts -  I do overuse commas and hyphens but at least you will never hear or read incorrect subject or object pronouns from me.  Bits from last night's class - don't say "me and my sister" are driving to the lake - say instead, "my sister and I".  You wouldn't say "me drove to the lake" so why would you say "me and my sister" did?  And "fewer problems and less pain" - know the difference.  Lesson over!  Fun class!  Now go make baby cakes!