Sometimes, you need cake. Sometimes you need cake NOW. For me, that was Friday night. I searched through my cake recipes, but none of them were what I wanted (chocolate and now), so I went to my pile of recipes that people have sent.
Keep in mind, before we go much further, that it had been a very long week for me, I was a bit cranky (and growing even more so waiting for the cake fairy to appear), and there wass nothing remotely cake like on my meal plan – so all I had was pantry staples.
OK. Texas Sheet Cake. I had everything, even pecans. Since I make a lot of granola, I always have pecans. But, I was assured that not having pecans is not a make or break thing for the glaze. And this is how it went:
Dry ingredients in a bowl…check.
Melt butter. Add cocoa. Add boiling water. Do I have to boil the water? Do I want to measure out the water, and put it in another pan? No. You might think that’s not a big deal, but at the moment, to me, it was.
Eggs, buttermilk, vanilla in the measuring cup I used for water.
Mix it all together. The batter is not thick, but since it only gets 20 minutes in the oven, it seems reasonable. It nicely filled my heavy duty half sheet pan (18 x 23). You need a big pan. This is Texas Sheet Cake, not Rhode Island Sheet Cake. It’s about the size.
Time for the glaze. It has roughly the same ingredients, so I didn’t even bother to wash out the saucepan or the measuring cup. The original recipe called for milk in the glaze. Why? The buttermilk is out! It’s sitting right in front of me! I don’t feel like pouring 6 tablespoons of milk from a large jug! And besides all that, somewhere in my brain is the recollection of a TSC so sweet that my toes curled.
The moment of truth arrived. The warm glaze gets poured over the warm cake – this is a new one on me, but it works! It seemed like just barely the right amount, but I probably should have poured it in a larger pattern. I put it on a rack to cool and tidied up the kitchen, until it was time to test the corner for quality control. The heavens sang and I no longer felt homicidal.
The boys had been hiding (er, doing something else) in the basement, but the smell of chocolate dragged them up like a tractor beam. I smiled and waved chocolatey fingers at them. They got the milk.
If you don’t always have buttermilk hanging about, make sure to put this recipe on your meal plan so it gets on your grocery list. It uses so few ingredients that faking buttermilk would be obvious.
This is a flat cake – more like a brownie. If I were to serve this to company, I’d prop a generous slice against a square of ice cream (yes, I would take my ice cream out of the carton and slice it – that’s just the kind of girl I am). But, it was just the boys sitting there, eating cake, and drinking milk right out of the carton.