It's snowing again, so let's bake a chocolate cake! (From 'Treasured Mennonite Recipes')

After creating this snowy post, I decided it was time to bake a bit of comfort food. I’d say that the category of comfort food is firmly within a traditional Mennonite’s wheelhouse, so I turned to a cookbook I’d borrowed from my aunt and still haven’t returned: Treasured Mennonite Recipes: All-Time Favorite Recipes from the Mennonite Community Relief Sales. Note the American spelling. This ain’t the Mennonite Treasury!

Thing is, I’m not great at cooking, so I chose what is probably supposed to be a child’s recipe: Wacky Cake. Is this really a traditional Mennonite recipe? I have my doubts, but it’s in the cookbook, so I collected the ingredients:

The genius of this recipe is that you mix it all in your cake pan. So let’s get started!

All dry ingredients go into the pan! (I’m mixing on my stovetop because I like the bright light! Plus I don’t have much counter space… which is not a big deal, because as I said before, I’m not really big into kitchen-y things anyway.)

The pink stuff is Himalayan salt. It’s fun!

Okay, so now the mixing part. This turned out to be a little more challenging than mixing in an actual bowl… so maybe you wouldn’t want a child doing this for you. Not sure.

Next, I had to make three divots for the wet ingredients.

I mixed them in this little measuring cup.

Nicely poured them into the divots.

At this point things began to get progressively messier.

The dream of neatness is a lost cause. Flour is everywhere.

But in the end, it looked like what a chocolate cake, prior to baking, ought to look like.

And ta-da! Here it is fresh out of the oven.

I had to test it.

And discovered my favourite part was the crispy top of the cake.

Now things were getting progressively worse, in a wholly unforeseen way,

I systematically sliced the top off every piece, then dusted them with icing sugar and ate the pieces like cookies. I don’t think this was the intention of the recipe. However, it worked out fine for us because Andrew likes his chocolate cake in a bowl with milk so he enjoyed the pieces I left behind. We make a good team.