Thelma's Chocolate Cake

My second attempt at baking a recipe from my Grandmother's collection promised to me the most difficult of all - because I'd have to do it without any help from my wife.

   That's because last week she celebrated a birthday - and since she was going to be out of the house for the day, I decided I'd surprise her (one way or the other) by fixing one of the cake recipes.

   This one promised to be difficult, because it only lists the ingredients (and a note to cook it at 350 degrees for 45 minutes). It also includes directions for making the icing!

   This effort drove home the fact that I don't know much about cooking. 

THELMA'S CHOCOLATE CAKE

   Here's a scan of the actual card - I love that it has assorted stains / splashes on it, indicating it was used many times.

    So first I ran to the store to pick up the ingredients, which includes:

Butter

Sugar

Chocolate

Eggs

Milk

Flour

Baking Powder

Salt

Vanilla

For the icing, you'll also need:

Powdered Sugar

And a real Lemon!

   So the challenge at the store was figuring out what kind of chocolate to buy. THERE ARE SO MANY CHOICES! Semi-sweet, dark, milk chocolate, and on and on.

   I finally settled on Milk Chocolate Chips, figuring I could melt them down. Yep, I'm an idiot.

   So I gathered the ingredients and starting mixing them in a big bowl. I melted the butter in a small pan to make it easier to mix. Then I decided to do the same thing with the chocolate. (On reading this, those of you who know how to cook are shaking your heads and saying, "Oh, Chuck.")

   I put the chips in a small pan and put it on the lowest possible heat. It almost immediately burned (and that was fun to clean, I can tell you). So I decided to just mix the chips into the mix as they were, assuming they'd melt in the baking process.

   I combined the ingredients and stirred them a lot. (I don't have a mixer. Yet.) It took much digging in the cabinets to uncover a couple of cake pans, which I washed, dried and coated with an anti-stick spray.

   I poured in the cake mix (doing my best to make them both even). Then into the oven for 45 minutes.

    While that was cooking, I mixed together the icing ingredients in a sauce pan. The instruction that threw me was the need for 1 tsp of "real lemon" - easy enough to squeeze out that much juice, but what do you do with the rest of the lemon?

    With no instructions for cooking / heating, I just put it over a low heat and stirred the ingredients together. It didn't take long at all to make - probably 10 minutes, so I had to keep stirring regularly while the cake mix finished baking.

   I had made a cake at least once before in my life. When I was very young (like, 10 years old) I made a cake for my Mom's birthday. I used a store-bought mix and followed the directions - but I tried to put it together as soon as it was out of the oven, so it slipped around on the plate and ended up a bit of a mess - but it was tasty and Mom seemed happy with my effort (though I probably made a heck of a mess in the process).

   So I knew, this time around, to let the cake cool a bit - about 10 or 15 minutes - and then started assembling. The big trick was getting the cake out of the pan intact - it stuck a bit to the bottom of the pan (which at least gave me a chance to sample it first).

   The icing went on reasonably well, and the finished cake looked pretty good - here's a picture:

    So, I won't be winning any cake decorating awards.

    Jeanette was surprised and seemed to be pleased - and the cake tasted good!

    My big mistake was using the chips - it ended up being more of a Chocolate Chip Cake, with lots of chips still intact in the mix.

   But all told, I'll label this one a success (and proof that it's good too be lucky sometimes).

   And no, I didn't try to write "Happy birthday" on the cake. A man should know his limits.