Best chocolate cake in the world

My mom found this recipe in a newspaper years and years ago. It was the groom's cake for my brother's wedding, and for mine. The thing that makes it special is the raspberry liquor poured over the cake after it's baked; it also does not skimp on the cocoa - it will appeal to those who like dark chocolate. I made it last night for the first time ever, and served it tonight for a friend's birthday; everyone said it was spectacular. My friend said, "It was beyond anything I could have hoped for." Next time I make it, I'm going to try orange liquor, as orange + chocolate is one of my favorite combinations.

Mom's Chocolate Chambord Cake

1 cup milk
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar (try evaporated cane juice - supposed to be a bit better for you)

1 3/4 cups regular flour (do not use cake flour)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 cup boiling water

1/2 to 2/3 cups Chambord raspberry liquor

Heat oven to 350 F.
Grease and flour (I use cocoa instead of white flour) 2 round or square cake
pans (9") or a 13" x 9" pan.

Beat eggs on medium speed for 2 minutes. Add milk, oil and vanilla and beat on medium speed for another minute or until combined. Stir in sugar and beat over low speed until you can scrape the bowl without encountering a big blob of sugar at the bottom.
In a large bowl combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt; set aside.
Stir cocoa into the cup of boiling water until smooth - this is 'blooming' the cocoa.
Add flour mixture and cocoa mixture to the liquid ingredients, alternating about 4 times, stirring by hand between each addition. I started and ended with the flour mixture.

Pour into pans and bake for 30 to 35 minutes for round pans, or 35-40
for rectangular pan, or until metal cake tester inserted in center
comes out clean. Glass pans need 5-10 minutes longer. Trust your cake tester. This batter is super thin and the cakes jiggle more than you would expect when they're done.

Cool cakes in round pans for 10 minutes, then remove from pans and
cool completely.

Wrap and freeze for a couple hours at least.

Remove from freezer, let thaw ~15 minutes, and use a toothpick to poke holes in the top of each layer. Spoon (I use a teaspoon to better control the even distribution
of the Chambord) 1/4 cup to 1/3 cup of Chambord raspberry liquor on each
layer. Pop the layers back in the freezer or fridge for 30 minutes to soak up all the Chambord. Frost with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting.


Chocolate Buttercream Frosting


6 tablespoons butter at room temperature or close to it
1/2 to 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, depending on how dark you want it to taste
2 2/3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk (may need additional milk)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cream together butter, cocoa, and powdered sugar. I had to cut in the butter with a fork; it kind of got lost in all the cocoa / sugar. Stir the vanilla into the milk and then over low speed add that to the bowl.

You can make this frosting ahead of time and store it in a sealed container at room temperature. Don't refrigerate it - this seems to permanently alter the texture, and you want it at room temp anyways, for ease of applying to the cake.

This makes about 2 cups of frosting.
Double the recipe to do a two-layer cake, though you will have almost a cup of frosting left over. Great for graham cracker dipping.


Notes from Mom:

This is a very moist cake and will freeze well.

This also will freeze nicely after it is frosted. Just be sure to
uncover it as soon as you take it out of the freezer so moisture
doesn’t condense on the frosting.

I have also decorated and served this cake with chocolate covered
strawberries on the top of the cake and around the base of the cake.
You can also dust powdered sugar on top of the strawberries and cake.
The strawberry and raspberry flavors are great together.

Notes from me:
I changed up the mixing sequence from the original recipe, and it turned out fine. The original recipe had the cocoa added to the dry ingredients, and then all that added to the wet, then the boiling water added last. I changed it to be a little more like Alton Brown's creaming method below.

I wonder how this cake would be different with butter instead of oil, creamed into the sugar a la Alton Brown (Excerpted from 'I'm Just Here for More Food,' 2004):

*Here's how the Creaming Method works:

Sift together the Dry Goods. That means any and all flours, your chemical leavening, salt and other dry spices – basically, everything but sugar.

Cream the solid fat and sugar(s), preferably with a stand mixer using the paddle attachment on medium speed, until light and fluffy. Okay, there I go using those vague terms of "light" and "fluffy." Here's when to stop: when you're no longer able to see sugar granules, but you can still feel them if you rub a bit of the creamed fat between your fingers. Although you can overcream (and you'll know that you have when your mixture moves from a smooth and homogeneous mixture to something akin to curdled milk), inadequate aeration (i.e. undercreaming) is far more common. As a rule of thumb, I like to see the volume of the fat increase by a third.

Add the eggs slowly. Many recipes call for adding eggs one at a time. I think that's kinda silly, because in most cases that means adding water (in the form of egg whites) directly to the fat. Since fats and water don't get along very well, batters mixed this way tend to come together slowly. To get around this, mix the eggs together first so that the water in the egg whites can hook up with the emulsifiers in the yolks. Add them in a steady stream and the eggs will be absorbed in no time.

Drop the mixer speed to low and add the dry goods slowly, alternating the addition of the dry goods with any other liquid ingredients. Then stir in any bits and pieces like chocolate chips at the end.

Depending on the amount of liquid involved, the mixture produced may be a pourable batter (a cake) or a thick paste (a chocolate chip cookie). So your final step would be to pour the batter into or "drop" the cookies onto a pan and bake.

Finally a decent amount of rain!

Old Man Winter has had mercy on us, and brought rain at least 3 times in the last month or so. The last episode involved almost an entire week of cloudy, damp weather, complete with fog and 2" of rain total. It has been lovely, though I could do without the cold. No riding when the high is 40F.

I've finally started working on my jewelry website. It won't have a database backend, because I can't find a free product that will let me feed multiple URLs off on the one database. For that matter, I can't find a free product that I can even decipher that is just a product DB and not the entire site + shopping cart rolled into one. I plan on having several sites, each targeted towards a different demographic, but there will be some overlap of products. Being able to manage those dynamically would be a boon, but it's a boon I think I'm going to have to pay someone to set up, and I can't afford that.

Depending on how you measure it, I did actually wind up in the black this year, on my own, for the first time in my life since having full scholarships in college. (I had been making up for the difference between what I needed and what I was bringing in with savings for a year and a half after moving out from sharing free living space with an acquaintance post-separation) I didn't pay for my health insurance this year but did pay for everything the insurance did not cover, which is substantial, as I did allergy shots throughout the year. There are three more vending events I hope to add next year, and those may enable me to pay for my own insurance as well.