• evolvedmommy
• On July 11, 2011

What’s left of the ULTIMATE chocolate cake I made this weekend.

This post is controversial, and I’m prepared for the backlash. I’m going to GIVE you my secret recipe for the best damn chocolate cake you’ve every had. Well, I’m going to tell you where to find it.

Until a year or so ago I didn’t know you could make things like pancakes, brownies and cake from scratch. These things come from a box at the grocery store, right? That’s what I thought, too!

One day last summer we were at Steve’s parents’ house and his mom had made THE BEST brownies I had ever put in my mouth, so naturally I asked her which brand they were. She looked at me with a mix of confusion and mild annoyance and said, “I made them from scratch.”

I looked back at her equally puzzled and annoyed and said, “What exactly do you mean by that.”

To which she responded, “Remember that binder I gave you last Christmas full of recipes? Look in there for one called ‘Brownies’”

Well, I’ll be darned! Got home, opened that thing (for probably the first time) and there it was: Brownies. From scratch.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps pancakes don’t always come from Bisquick. What???

Turns out if you go to food.com or allrecipes.com and search “pancakes” you can sort by “most popular” or by “ingredient” or by “newest” and get a ton of results. At food.com alone there are over 3,300 recipes for pancakes (IHOP, fluffy, vegan, buttermilk, etc.) FYI, in our house we agree that THIS is the best pancake recipe of them all.

One of the great things about using an online recipe site like these is that you can read what others have said about the recipe and their success (or complete failure) with it. The other great thing is that you can store your favorites and then pull them up on your handy-dandy iPad right there in the kitchen. Heck yeah!

Okay, so we still haven’t gotten to the cake recipe. Well, I’ll tell you this: it isn’t on a either of these websites and it’s not in any of my cookbooks.

This is some low-tech home ec here, y’all.

It’s from the back of the Hershey’s Cocoa container. I know, shocking! My thinking was that Hershey’s probably has a test kitchen type thing where they try all kinds of recipes with their products. Now, they are going to find the very best to put on their container because they want consumers to have a great experience with their product. So far, my hypothesis is ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

On the back of the Cocoa box (and this may change periodically) there is a recipe for Chocolate Cake and Chocolate Icing. I followed these exactly. The only modification (if you can call it that) is that I used organic butter, milk, whole wheat flour and unrefined sugar.

The moral of this story is: Go to the source. (Or go to the web.) We are living on modern times, ladies, but sometimes the solution is surprisingly unmodern.

You no longer have to stare at all of your pretty cookbooks and wonder if the recipes inside are actually any good.

So what are your favorite recipe sites or resources? Have you ever had a horrible experience cooking (because I have). I’d love to hear about the good, the bad and the ugly from your kitchen.

Hershey’s Chocolate Cake & Frosting recipes