Mom’s Chocolate Cake with Minute Fudge Icing – Bake Memories

I had a hankering for the chocolate cake my 93-year-old mother loved from her childhood: Mom’s Chocolate Cake with Minute Fudge Icing. I’d never tasted it, but if mom liked it, it had to be good.

It began five years ago when my mother bequeathed me her mother’s cookbook, a first edition from the Good Housekeeping Institute dated 1927. She said,”She made the best chocolate cake, can you find the recipe and make it for me?” These culinary memories are important to all of us.

A 93-Year-Old Recipe

I flipped through the tiny, ancient tome and out fell a color magazine clipping which I scanned quickly to discover it was from the 1970s: a Hellman’s Mayonaise cake using a box chocolate cake mix. I read aloud its ingredients and scoffed at the possibility mom might have been duped by a box-cake recipe.

Mom was disappointed. But I realized I was wrong–my grandmother was in her 80s in the 1970s and began living with us then. She didn’t do much cooking then. So the mysterious recipe had to be from an earlier time. We had yet to unearth the original, beloved 90-year-old recipe. It was merely a red herring on the quest for Mom’s Chocolate Cake with Minute Fudge Icing. The real McCoy.

Today as I stayed home with the rest of the world to flatten the curve of COVID-19, I thought I’d make a better effort to find Mom’s Chocolate Cake with Minute Fudge Icing. As I paged through the stained and dislocated pages of the book, a yellowed page from a bridge pad, folded in half, fell out of the book. As I unfolded it I thought, “Eureka!” I’ve found the recipe.

And it’s everything my mother loves: a fudge icing over a tender chocolate cake. Here”s the recipe…

Mom’s Chocolate Cake with Minute Fudge Icing

Preparation time: 15 minutes, baking time 20 minutes, serves 8

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/8 pound butter (a half stick!)
• 1/2 cup hot water
• 2 squares bitter chocolate or 2 heaping tablespoons of cocoa
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/2 cup sour milk mixed with 3/4 teaspoon baking soda (If you don’t have sour milk on hand, you can make your own by adding 1 1/2 teaspoons of fresh lemon juice to the half cup of milk.)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Grease a 9 x 9 inch square cake pan.
3. In a small saucepan, combine butter, hot water and the chocolate or cocoa. Cook until melted and smooth, stirring occasionally. Set aside.
4. In a mixing bowl, sift together flour and sugar.
5. Add warm chocolate mixture to flour in mixing bowl. Mix until combined.
6. Add the egg, sour milk mixture and vanilla and mix thoroughly.
7. Place in preheated oven for 10 minutes then raise the temperature to 375F and continue cooking another 20 minutes until your finger springs back when you touch the top of the cake.
8. Make the icing while the cake begins to cool.

Minute Fudge Icing

Makes a cup of icing; preparation time 10 minutes

• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 cup sugar
• Pinch salt

1. Combine ingredients.
2. Boil one minute.
3. Remove from fire and beat immediately until creamy enough to spread.
4. Pour over warm cake.

Here’s another, more complex chocolate cake recipe from my blog…Hazelnut Torte with Chocolate Ganache