I have, on occasion, made treats for my office mates. I came up with some sort of order for everyone to pick a treat. Most recently the choice was “plain chocolate cake; you know, the kind that’s dense inside and has a bit of a crisp outside.” So that was my task. And what I found was Cook’s Illustrated Simple Chocolate Sheet Cake.
List of ingredients:
- 3/4 cup cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-processed
- 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon table salt
- 8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
- 12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), plus extra for baking pan
- 4 large eggs
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Okay – as an aside – I really wish magazines and cookbooks would use both cups AND weight measures. Weight measures are so much more accurate than cups and spoons. Sigh.
Set the oven to 325f; grease a 9×13 baking pan with butter and set aside.
Sift the cocoa, flour and salt together and set aside. The recipe says to melt the butter and chocolate in the microwave. We don’t have a microwave so I used a pot over another pot on the stove.
You can see the pot of chocolate and butter in the pot of water getting ready to melt. The blue bowl in the back has the cocoa, flour and salt. The other bowl has the eggs, sugar and vanilla that had been whisked together.
Once the chocolate and butter was melted, I whisked them into the egg mixture. Then the buttermilk and baking soda were added:
Then the dry ingredients were added and it was all dumped into the baking pan:
Okay, here it is ready to go in the oven:
35 minutes later and:
I’ll let you know what my co-workers thought of it. No one ate it here on the day it was made because we had this huge burger and poutine dinner 😉 Toby snuck in a small piece – he thought it was an absolutely fine chocolate cake, not wonderful, it was just chocolate cake. Which is what I was going for I guess so there you go.
2 replies on “Chocolate sheet cake – definitely NOT keto friendly!”
Jamie Oliver has all his recipes in weights, I think. I lack a kitchen scale.
Did you do any sort of topping? Frosting, a dusting of powdered sugar or anything?
Yes, my English (from the UK) cookbooks all use weight instead of cups and spoons. Europe too. I wish it’d cross over to North America!
For work I’ll just use icing sugar – same as powered sugar I think. This is a dense cake though so it’d work well with any lighter frosting. The heavy rich stuff might be overkill.