Oy

In my quest to take care of two recipes in one day and yet preserve space in my kitchen, I wanted to try cake and frosting recipes that would go together. Since I was missing one key ingredient for each of the two cake recipes I really wanted to use, I searched for another. I found one on allrecipes.com with a high overall rating from many reviewers and decided to give it a try.

This Chocolate Cake apparently won the Greatest Cocoa Cake Contest at the Pennsylvania Farm Show one year. I only made the cake part, not the frosting it is shown with since I wanted to try another frosting recipe, but I have to say I was very unimpressed. The majority of the chocolate flavor must be in the frosting, because the cake itself just tastes generic. It's light and fluffy enough, but there's not really anything special about it. I also tried to make cupcakes rather than a full cake, so I lowered the baking time to 18-20 minutes. The batter expanded significantly, which meant the customary "fill the cups to 2/3" rule didn't work for me - the batter expanded over the tops of the cups and fused to cupcake pan. I even tried only filling them about halfway, but that didn't fully work either. Of the 36 cupcakes I made, I was only able to salvage about 12.

In my opinion, this recipe is a waste of ingredients, and a lot of ingredients at that (3 cups of brown sugar? 4 eggs? 2 sticks of butter?). In fact, I still had batter enough batter for another 12-24 cupcakes that I tossed because I was so fed up. So, essentially, I didn't like this recipe, nor do I intend to use it again. If you have better luck, be sure to let me know!