Lives to Eat

I had a girlfriend over on Saturday night for dinner and some girly chatting. She had the recipes all picked out for dinner, but didn't mention anything about dessert. (I will attempt to recreate the dinner recipes and post about them later.) I decided that since she was doing dinner, I'd pick and make a dessert. I didn't have much time, so I wanted to make a recipe where I already had all the ingredients on hand. I ended up looking through the Taste of Home Baking Book that I got for $5 around Christmas time. I found a simple chocolate cake recipe. I figured that one would work and thought I'd just dust it with powdered sugar instead of frosting it. As I kept looking through the book, I found a caramel sauce that sounded like it would be delicious on top of the cake. I combined the two recipes to make a delicious dessert that I'd definitely make again. I made a couple small modifications to the recipe that I'll include below.



Moist Chocolate Cake with Caramel Sauce
Adapted from Taste of Home Baking Book

Makes 1 9-inch round cake

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
3 TBSP baking cocoa (I used Hershey's Special Dark)
1/2 tsp salt
6 TBSP vegetable oil
1 TBSP white vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup cold water
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1. Combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in the mixing bowl of a stand mixer (or can be mixed by hand in a large bowl) and mix to combine.
2. Make three wells in the dry ingredients. Pour oil into one well, vinegar into another, and vanilla into the third. Pour water slowly over all. Beat on low speed until thoroughly combined, scraping bowl as necessary. The batter will be thin.
3. Add chocolate chips and mix until the chips are evenly distributed.
4. Pour the batter into a greased or parchment lined 9 inch round cake pan.
5. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick entered near the center of the cake comes out clean.
6. Cool prior to slicing and serving topped with Caramel Sauce.



Caramel Sauce

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
3 TBSP flour
Dash salt
1 1/4 cups water
2 TBSP butter
1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Combine brown sugar, flour, and salt in a saucepan. Stir in water and butter.
2. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil and stir for 3 minutes.
3. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.
4. Serve warm poured over individual cake slices.




If I were to make this again, I probably would not put the chocolate chips into the cake. The batter was so thin that all the chips sunk to the bottom of the cake. The chips were not part of the original recipe; they were my addition. It still tasted good, but just wasn't exactly what I was aiming for.