Chocolate Wacky Cake

This is my favorite cake recipe. I got this from a co-worker. I use it when ever I want to make a chocolate cake. I've used it for cup cakes. I like it because it is a from scratch cake recipe that is about as easy as a mix.

This recipe has an interesting history originally dating back to egg rationing during WWII. This cake can easily be made vegan by using the water instead of the milk. Actually the original recipe I got said to use water, but I'm a big milk fan in baking. Actually the first time I made this recipe they forgot to mention the water or milk so It was a little dry. Luckily a phone call saved the day there.

One key in this recipe is balancing the baking soda with the vinegar. Definitely error on the side of more vinegar. I first got this recipe as 1 t Soda to 1 t Vinegar and to often the recipe was left with this weird bitter soda flavor. I've recently upped to double as present in this recipe, but I have seen online recipes that triple it to 1 T. The sour flavor of the vinegar is going to be more palatable than the bitter of the soda.

I'm a big fan of dutch process cocoa. When I went to Switzerland, I got some Swiss cocoa there. That was better still. Choosing the right cocoa is the cornerstone to a good chocolate cake. This recipe actually has 50% more cocoa than other recipes I've seen online. If you want to drop it down to 4 T. It should still be excellent. The cocoa I'm going to try next time is the Hershey's special dark label. It won't be the Swiss chocolate, but they stopped carrying anything labeled dutch process at my grocery store.

Ingredients

• 1.5c flour
• 1c sugar
• 1t baking soda
• 0.25t salt
• 6T cocoa
• 1c water or milk (+1/2c if making cupcakes)
• 5T oil (I prefer canola oil,mmm... Omega 3 fatty acids)
• 1t vanilla
• 2t vinegar

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix dry ingredients together into baking pan. I usually just run them thru my sifter to help them combine.
3. In a measuring cup combine the liquid ingredients.
4. Whisk the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. Make sure to get the corners of the pan.
5. Quickly get the pan into the oven for 25-35min. The vinegar and baking soda will start to react fairly quickly so you don't want this to sit around or else it may not rise properly.

Cupcakes

1. Make sure to add the extra liquid.
2. The cupcake batter will need to be made in a bowl not directly in a pan.
3. One batch should fill 12 cupcakes with 1/3 cup of batter.
4. Just as it was important to get the cake quickly into the oven, do not delay when measuring the batter into the cups.

Decorating this cake is pretty standard. You can let it cool and dust it with confectioner's sugar. Or frost it with store icing. Serve it warm with Ice cream. or mix a pkg of instant pudding with only 1 cup of milk and pour that over the cake into the pan. Kind of a self leveling icing.

I have been considering a vanilla version of this cake. I would expect it to have a consistency not unlike pound cake. I would probably just leave out the cocoa and double the vanilla. We will see.

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