Oh, Fudge It

What's in YOUR refrigerator?

I believe in tradition, even if I have to make one up every year, and so it is with solemn pride that I report this is the thirty-fifth year in a row I have screwed up the fudge-slathered fudge cake in a completely new way.

It's never come out right, but it never comes out wrong the same way twice. I am not a baker. A baker understands things about temperature and chemistry and eggs. I have the reputation in my family as a baker on account of I do bake things, and I bake things because I like eating baked goods. In much the same way, Dave is a cook because he likes eating, um, food. We come as a set. It usually works out.

My baking works out mainly because it's hard to throw flour and sugar and butter and cream together without getting something yummy out of it, even if you have to rename it.

Usually I mess up the fudge frosting on the fudge-slathered fudge cake. It either sets up too strenuously and slabs onto the cake like shingles, or stucco, or something other than smooth shiny slatherance; or, conversely, it doesn't set up at all, and we have to chase it all over the counter with spoons. In all likelihood this is a matter of temperature and if I were an actual baker I would have a sense how hot to bile it and for how long, OR I would have a thermometer and precise instructions. The recipe doesn't mention a thermometer. It merely suggests I cook it on medium low for about ten minutes. On the test kitchen's stove, using the test kitchen's saucepan. The home cook is on her own.

I messed up the frosting a little this time. Calls for six ounces of unsweetened chocolate, for which I substituted the three ounces I actually had on hand, two ounces of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and a pale, desiccated old ounce I scrounged from my neighbor, because it's not really Thanksgiving unless you're missing a key ingredient and the stores are all closed.

I don't usually mess up the cake. At least, not any more than it's been messed up every year. It involves whipped-up egg whites and whipped-up egg yolks. You're supposed to fold the egg whites into the rest of the cake batter. "Folding" egg whites is one of those baker jokes. Real bakers laugh themselves silly over putting that instruction into a recipe, because it is not possible to mix fluffy egg whites into chocolate and ground nuts and keep any loft in them at all. There's really no point. Nevertheless, I try for it every year. The two cake layers bake up fluffy and then swoon into sad little cratered crackers as they cool.

This year, however, I dropped a bit of egg yolk into the egg whites and couldn't persuade it out, so I just went ahead and tried to whip it all into Soft Peaks. I did not achieve Soft Peaks. I achieved an apathetic foam floating on a sea of snot.

Hell with it, I said. It's not like this cake ever stays fluffy anyway. I mashed all the egg portions together with the nuts and chocolate and poured the whole mess into the pans, and I will be dogged if the cake didn't turn out better than it ever had. It's not fluffy, of course, but this time it's not actually concave.

Well! The frosting turned out perfect too. Without any doubt, this was the most successful fudge-slathered fudge cake in 35 years. Somewhere, there's a cabal of bakers cackling their fannies off thinking of how much pointless bullshit they get people to do. I should've known right off the bat when the first instruction was "grease two pans and then line with tin foil." Because everyone knows how much tin foil loves to stick to pans! Very funny, baker cabal.

Next year I'm going to throw all the ingredients at once into a big bowl and chuck eggs into it from across the room, fish out the shell fragments, and mix. It'll be fine.

Just Desserts

It must have been almost thirty years ago that the family decided we could probably shake up a few traditions without pissing off the gods, and we examined the Thanksgiving dinner menu with fresh eyes. That's the kind of thing you're allowed to do when your family traditions include items from the Jell-O and marshmallow families. Dave and his sister didn't really like turkey, but the rest of us thought that was non-negotiable. Possibly even a matter of law. Punkin pie was mandatory also, but there could be a little wiggle room with other desserts. "What this dinner needs," Susan said, "is more chocolate." Or any chocolate.

I'd recently run across a promising-sounding recipe in a magazine I, as a letter carrier, was supposed to deliver, and printed off a copy of it at work at the expense of the stamp-buying public (thank you, America). I couldn't remember what it was offhand but I offered to have a look. "Does it have any chocolate in it?" Susan asked.

I located the recipe under a rumple of papers on my desk. "Let's see," I said, smoothing it out, "it's called 'Fudge-Slathered Fudge Cake.'"

"Bring it," Susan instructed.

The next day

It was one of those recipes that starts out as a pain in the ass. You preheat the oven to 350 and then you find square pans and grease them and then line them with tin foil and then grease that and flour it and knock out the excess flour, and by then your oven is preheated and you haven't even touched an ingredient. But the ingredients are tremendous. A pound of chocolate, a half pound of butter, eggs, sugar, walnuts, brandy, and two tablespoons of flour just to restore order and discipline. It's still a bit of a pain in the ass but you can feel confident it's going to be great, because chocolate butter sugar brandy. You do have to whip the egg whites and egg yellows separately and "gently fold"--god, I love that--the whites into your chocolate sludge. If there's a way to do that without losing all the loft from the egg whites, I have never found it. Then you bake your two layers, and they puff up sort of randomly, and you let them cool overnight on a rack.

The next morning your little square cake layers look all stomped to hell. They're lumpy and shrunken and flat as an old lady's tit. Or so I'm told. It's a panic situation, that first year, but hey--that's what the frosting is for. It starts out as cream and sugar. You're supposed to boil those and then reduce to low and let it bubble for ten minutes whilst "occasionally washing down sugar crystals from the side of the pan with a moistened pastry brush." Like I'm ever going to do anything with a moistened pastry brush.

The frosting is fabulous and the cakes go together beautifully, with walnuts pressed into the sides for the jazz of it. It's a hit. Anyone who ingests more than about a two-inch cube of it has to lie down on the floor for an hour, but it's a hit. And a tradition is born.

Embiggen for recipe

The next year, and all the years after that, the cakes do the exact same thing, but by then you've realized that they're only in the recipe to keep the fudge frosting layers apart, like a semi-colon holding back a pair of clauses. But the frosting doesn't set up properly. You review your ingredients, find them accurately measured, and frost the cake anyway as is. After a while someone notices it's crawling off the counter and heading for the hinterlands at a dead gallop. It's a family effort to corral the frosting with a deft posse of fingers, and even if it doesn't look like it belongs on a magazine cover, you still have to make it again the next year.

Discoveries are made over the decades. A few years in, I scribble a note in the margins: no need to grease the pans first. Duh. The tin foil slides right out. Some years the frosting works and some years it doesn't. I finally realize it's one of those heat things. It's chemistry. Chemistry was my favorite subject but when it slides into the kitchen arena, it's black magic. This frosting business is one of those candy-making deals where you have to check if your balls are hard or soft, and it's all too embarrassing. At some point I recognize that my frosting works if I let it bubble at a higher temperature for a slightly longer time. I scribble that in my margins.

I could have taken a full degree course at a culinary institute and figured this out faster than I did on my own. But I've got it working now.

Dinner is great. Dave makes a plaintive and utterly futile motion that we have prime rib instead of turkey next year. That's a tradition, too.