Retro Baking: Devil's Food Cake

Child Tester is crazier for these retro recipes than I had realized! She expects I also will dig into my digitized files of Ross’ great-grandmother’s receipt books so we can make stuff from both sides of the family. He calls her Granny, so you’ll see that name when we start getting into her recipes.

If you’ve never had a devil’s food cake before, it’s basically a chocolate cake. If the total absence of meaningful difference between a devil’s food cake and a plain Jane chocolate cake has ever stymied you before, here’s the difference. From the eater’s perspective, they’re basically the same. DFC is still lighter than PJCC is, though. Based on this link, pretty sure my grandmother’s cake is not devil’s food after all. Still tastes good, though!

I made a smaller batch of buttercream than you ordinarily would expect for the cake, mainly so I wouldn’t have to frost the sides. I soooo dislike frosting the sides of cakes! It was much easier when I had a turning cake stand, but I do not and I don’t have room for another. Unfrosted sides tend to be my go-to as a result.

Here’s what you’ll need

2 cups (8 ounces) cake flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup shortening (yes, she made me use shortening and wouldn’t let me sub in butter)

1 1/4 cups brown sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 ounces (this is one box) unsweetened chocolate, melted (she had no choice but to let me use cocoa powder, because I only had half the needed chocolate)

3/4 cup water

Here’s what you’ll do

Preheat your oven to 350F/180C/GM4. Sift flour, baking soda, and salt (spoiler alert: I didn’t do this!). Cream shortening; add sugar gradually (I dumped it all in); cream together until light and fluffy. Y’all give this at least 3 minutes, because that’s really how long it takes even if everyone pretends you can do it faster.

Once your mix is light and fluffy, add your unbeaten eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Then add vanilla and cooled chocolate, and beat until smooth. Add your dry ingredients alternately with the water, stirring only enough after each addition to blend the ingredient in thoroughly.

NOTE: for those of you who aren’t aware of this, “add alternately” means you add about half of your dry ingredients, mix them in, then all of your wet, which you also mix in, then the last half of your dry. This is the correct order for doing this. If you reverse it, you generally will wind up with a more pudding-like cake than a regular cake.

Lookin’ good! If your cakes wind up with a center bulge after they’ve cooled, you can just cut them off and make cake pops from those bits so the cake will sit flat.

Bake time!

You’ll need 2 8-inch pans for this. Presumably they’re round, but maybe they’re square! I don’t have 2 pans in that size (in any shape), so I used 9” pans instead. It’s whatever. If you also are changing the size of the pan, you’ll need to add or subtract some time from the bake time. If the pan is bigger, subtract a few minutes. Smaller? Add some.

Spray or rub oil or butter into your cake pan, then add a small amount of flour (way less than I did) and tap the pan until it’s evenly coating the grease. Do all of this over the sink, and when it’s all coated, turn the pan upside down over the sink and beat it. Yes, beat it, not tap it. Not beating sometimes means too much flour left in the pan. So take whatever irritated you on this day out on your 2 cake pans!

Once they’re greased, pour half of the mixture into each pan, then bake for 25-30 minutes. Stick a skewer or a knife in the middle to make sure it’s done. If it’s done, knife will come out clean. If it’s not, it won’t. Sometimes you’ll still get a crumb or two on the knife if it’s done, and that’s okay. The rest of the instructions are in the caption of the photo below!

Oops! If you didn’t know, you can glue cakes back together with your buttercream or other frosting. I kinda sorta glued it back once the cakes had cooled, but I didn’t put a ton of effort into it because I already knew no one cared. Also, do you see how overly floured my cake pans were? You’ll do better, I’m sure.

Either way, give those cakes about 10 minutes to cool in the pan, then get them out. If you are in a hurry and have to put your hot cakes in the fridge or freezer to cool, for real don’t leave them in the pan. It’s always harder/impossible to get cake out of a cold pan in one piece, whether fridge/freezer is involved or not, so the ideal way to prevent what you see happened here is to not go over 5-10 minutes of resting in the pan.

While these are cooling, make your buttercream or other preferred frosting. Once the cakes are cooled, frost as desired, then eat!