This latest frosting recipe is really giving me fits, I tell you! I tweaked it… and made it worse than ever! Like I said, epic fail. I promise you, one of these days I will get it right and share it with you, but today is not the day.

On a happier note (like maybe B flat, I think it might be my favorite), I also tried a new cake recipe, and Bingo! A hit! And a new favorite, as well. I found the recipe in the newspaper, oddly enough (who even reads a paper anymore? Not me… excepting, of course, the all important Food section), in a feature called Recipe Finder, where readers write in seeking long-lost recipes. This particular one that attracted my interest, was a vintage recipe for “Hot Milk Cake”. Apparently, the woman who contributed the recipe had been baking it for 50 years or more. That is a well-tested recipe!

I’ve only made it once, but that was enough to convince me: this recipe’s a keeper! It made nice high, sturdy layers with a rich flavor. It’s not a light and fluffy cake (I believe there is a similar recipe called Hot Milk Sponge Cake that would probably yield a fluffier version), but I love the moist density it offers instead. “Light and Fluffy” often means “Lacking in Flavor” - not so with this cake, which is bursting with sweet - but not too sweet - richness.

The best thing is that I cut the sugar in half and it still turned out perfectly! Sometimes cutting the sugar in cake recipes results in disaster, but not with this one. I love a cake that can withstand a little tweaking.

Without further ado, then, here’s the recipe:

This may not be as quick as a cake mix, but it’s still pretty QUICK. Using your time wisely by heating the milk and butter, and mixing the dry ingredients while the eggs are beating makes it come together a little faster.

I’ve only made it once so far, but my gut feeling is that this is an EASY recipe, one I like to think of as “sturdy” or fool-proof. Fail safe! Time and future efforts may prove me wrong, but for now I’m going to say it’s one of the easier cake recipes I’ve tried.

It does have a lot of eggs, milk and butter, so in that sense it isn’t exactly CHEAP. However, cake is generally a “special occasion” kind of thing, so it’s a fairly inexpensive extravagance. (How’s that for an oxymoron?!)

Cake is never HEALTHY. OK, maybe somebody out there in the blogosphere has made a truly healthy cake, but I bet you anything it doesn’t taste all that great. Two things make cake an unhealthy diet choice: sugar and white flour. I feel good about reducing the sugar in this recipe by half, but it’s still largely based on white flour. Even if I did use some whole wheat flour, it would still be an extravagance (there’s that word again). So enjoy sparingly.

These flowers have nothing to do with Moist Chocolate Cake, but I thought they were pretty and I wanted to share them with you. Aren’t they pretty?

Here’s the cake:

I have to admit something here. I never make a cake from a mix, but not because I am a great cake baker. Far from it, in fact. Cakes I bake tend to be dry and crumbly, undercooked or overcooked, or just plain not very good. However, I persevere because I find the ingredients in a box mix to be, in a word, scary. Hydrogenated oil (i.e. trans fats) is something I avoid like the plague mostly because it is kind of like the plague. Then there are those un-pronounceables that always make me wonder if it’s food or a chemical reaction.

When I decided to make a cake for my sister-in-law’s birthday the other day, and knowing my propensity for dry and crumbly cakes, I specifically looked for a recipe described as moist. I found one at AllRecipes, and tweaked it based on the reviews (which, by the way, is one thing I LOVE about AllRecipes!). Can you believe I only adjusted the sugar by a quarter cup?! Sometimes I think my dry cakes are the result of attempting to remove too much sugar; besides, I have a chart that shows you the minimum amount of sugar you can use in a recipe, and 1 1/2 cups was pretty much it for this cake. I made some other minor changes, notably to use real butter instead of margarine (trans fats again!) and an easier measurement for the cocoa powder.

Most cake recipes are probably not as quick, easy or fail-safe as the boxed mix variety, but I have stumbled across some great tips along the way that certainly help.

1. Always bring butter and eggs to room temperature.
A quick and easy way to bring butter to room temp is to slice it into tablespoons. It will take 5 minutes or less to bring it to room temp this way. Eggs can be placed in a bowl of warm water, but this is not necessarily completely effective.

2. Beat the butter before adding sugar.
Most recipes say to beat butter and sugar together, but it actually improves the cake’s texture if the butter is beaten first. Place room temp butter in the mixer and beginning on low speed, gradually increase the speed until you’re at about med-high. Once butter is smooth, beat in the sugar, then proceed with the rest of the recipe.

3. Measure flour carefully using the scoop-and-scrape method.
And if a recipe calls for sifting, be sure to follow through, because that will most definitely affect the final product.

4. Cool cakes on a wire rack.
This allows the cake to cool evenly. Also, if it’s left in the pan on the stove-top (as I have been known to do), it may continue to cook a little too much, resulting in heavy dry cake.

As for the frosting, I’m going to be working on a series of posts featuring powdered-sugar-free frostings, so stay tuned for those!

This may not be as QUICK as a boxed mix, but it really doesn’t take too much more time. If you slice up the butter and set the eggs in warm water while you mix the dry ingredients, they should be ready to go in the mixer by the time you’re done. Prep the pans and preheat the oven before you ever start to save time at the end.

This is, however, one of the EASY-er cakes I have made, and seems sturdy enough of a recipe to handle minor adjustments. It was a cinch to bake and remove from the pans, and the layers were nice and high, and moist as the name promised. Not every cake recipe is so obliging!

It’s CHEAP, too, using only basic baking ingredients most people have on hand at any given time. To be honest, I haven’t priced cake mixes in a long time, so I don’t even know how it would compare, but I do know this: one box of cake mix makes only one cake, but packages of flour, sugar, eggs and butter can make multiple cakes. In the long run, it seems more cost-effective to bake cakes from staple ingredients you already own than to purchase a separate box just for that purpose.

One could hardly describe this cake as HEALTHY, not by a long shot. However, it is free of trans fats and the dreaded “unpronounceables”, artificial flavors and colors. It also uses the minimum amount of sugar, so in comparison, it is healthier than a cake mix. But not healthy enough to eat on a regular basis, so I think I will save it for birthdays and the like!