Mud Pie or the Upside-down Cake

Looks a mess doesn't? It was a mess......

My brother-in-law and I decided we needed a cake the last time I visited. I had brought a new cookbook with me that I was working through. He wanted a chocolate cake, so I found a devil's food cake recipe with an interesting frosting that called for melted chocolate. I don't think I will mention the cookbook, as the recipe didn't really turned out anything like it was suppose to. I read through the recipe and happily started pulling out bowls and ingredients. The recipe said to start the frosting first as it needed time to cool, so I found the baking chocolate and started melting it. I also started the cake batter and it wasn't until I went to look for the baking cocoa that things started to go downhill...... 

No baking cocoa.

 How are we suppose to make a cake without baking cocoa?!!? Of course we could have just ran out to the store and bought some, but that sounded like a lot of work. I rummaged around looking for more baking chocolate, but decided I needed to deal with the frosting first. That is when Crisis #2 reared it's head. 

As I was reading the recipe again and noting that there really wasn't a lot of sugar in the frosting a little thought began niggling in the back of my mind. I had just assumed when it said baking chocolate it was talking about chocolate with an 70-80% cacao ratio. But with the amount of sugar called for that couldn't be right. I quickly mixed in the sugar and gave it a taste...... bitter, very bitter. I checked the cookbook for an explanation of ingredients, it called for baking chocolate to be around 60-70%. I checked the ratio of the baking chocolate....... 100% cacao!!! Opps!

Now I had a cake will no chocolate and frosting with too much chocolate!! We should be able to work this out, right? Just put a bit of chocolate "frosting mixture" in the cake batter and add more sugar to the rest of the frosting. Simple.

Not sure if that was the best idea, but we did get a cake of sorts in the end. I think the "frosting mixture" made the batter too thin, when we tried to remove it from the pans it just crumbled. In the end we piled the pieces on the plate put the crumbles on top and patted everything into a cake shape. I was afraid of putting too much powdered sugar in the frosting so it was also too thin and almost ran off the cake. At this point we were tired of fussing and decided this was as good as it was going to get. Time to eat it!

Boy, was it yummy! One of the messiest cakes I have ever eaten, but so good! A deep dark chocolaty-ness, like eating a fudge cake A small piece went a long way!

Some day I am going to give that recipe a try........the right way.