Easy Chocolate Cake

This is truly the easiest chocolate cake ever, and surprisingly delicious. It's fun and different to make -- you've heard of a one-bowl cake -- well, this is a one-saucepan cake.  Yes, it's all mixed on the stove top.

In an essay entitled "The Low-Tech Person's Batterie de Cuisine" in Home Cooking by the late great Laurie Colwin, she writes that fancy (or a lot of) equipment isn't needed to turn out wonderful home-cooked meals. (Who needs a food processor when you have a knife?) This cake recipe, probably from the 1940s, is proof of that.  It requires just a saucepan, a fork (to beat the egg), a spoon to stir the batter, a measuring cup and a baking tin.

Start by cooking the milk, chocolate and butter.  Add  the sugar and cool.  Then add the egg and dry ingredients.  Stir and pour into an 8- or 9-inch cake pan.  (Or you could divide the batter to make a layer cake.)

When it is done baking, let it cool.  You can slice off the "dome" as I did.  A nice way to get a flat top (and taste-test the cake -- we gave it an A).

I was rushing when I made this cake because I was bringing it to a friend's house just an hour after I began the preparation.  I whipped up some vanilla frosting quickly and, because the cake was still warm when I had to frost it, left the sides unfrosted so that the heat would have an escape route. I added some sprinkles so no one would notice.

I followed the recipe exactly, baking it in an 8-inch pan.  (Not sure what a utility pan is.)  I used unsalted butter and Scharffen Berger unsweetened chocolate.  Because I didn't have any whole milk on hand, a combination of skim milk and half and half was a nice substitute.

The Eight Hour Chicken Sandwich

DH arrived home yesterday from a long business trip and, wanting to make him something special for dinner, I decided to surprise him with a chicken sandwich.  But, as the late great Laurie Colwin said, a really good chicken sandwich takes hours -- one needs to roast a chicken, bake a loaf of white bread and whip up a batch of homemade mayonnaise.  So that's exactly what I did.  Eight hours later, dinner was served!

Using a vintage bread recipe (see the bottom of this post), I put together the dough and then seasoned and roasted a chicken.

Next, I made some delicious mayonnaise in just five minutes, using the ingredients below.  One *should* hand whisk the oil, but I did it all in the blender and it was perfect.

Using the best quality ingredients -- like this olive oil (axiomia.biz) and Edmond Fallot mustard (from France)  --
will make for an excellent mayonnaise.

Finally, at about 6 p.m., all the elements were in place and the sandwiches were ready to be made.  (But it's not like I spent all those hours in the kitchen  -- I went to the gym when the bread was rising, shopped the farmer's market when the chicken was roasting and worked on a freelance job while the bread was baking.)

I halved the bread recipe and got two smallish loaves.  The kitchen was perfumed with the aroma baking bread for hours.

I let the roasted chicken cool before slicing it.  Only white meat for DH.

Once you see how easy and delicious homemade mayonnaise is, you might never go back.  I used a modern recipe I found on the internet.  

These sandwiches were wonderful; the addition of farmer's market tomatoes and lettuce only made them better.  

Of course, chicken sandwiches can be made in five minutes with store bought bread and mayonnaise and a supermarket rotisserie chicken.  But there's something quite satisfying about going back to the very basics, to the elemental building blocks to create something -- that kind of activity is too often lost in our swirling busy world.  (Of course, maybe it's lost precisely because making a chicken sandwich takes eight hours, and we have better things to do with our time.)

The bread recipe I used is below, but I wouldn't recommend it.  I much prefer this recipe, if you're going to make the effort to bake bread.