Celebrate with Chocolate Cake!

The book, In Defense of Food, contains a passage which tells how a psychologist conducted an experiment in which he showed the words, "chocolate cake" to Americans and recorded the word accociations they came up with. The top word association was guilt. Interestingly enough, he conducted the same experiment with a group of French folks and the word which most often came up was celebration.

My son must be French, or at least he's got his head screwed on right. He turned 21 today and requested a fudgy, chocolatey cake for his birthday.

Upon searching, I found that my own recipe books and notes and folded papers and old 3x5 cards did not contain exactly what I was looking for - I didn't have the perfect chocolate cake recipe - it couldn't even be found in my copy of Julia Child's The Way to Cook. So I did what any 21 year old would have done in the first place, I googled, "fudgy chocolate cake recipes."

I found one likely candidate, but it only makes a small, square cake and really looked more like a pan of brownies than a cake. I decided to try that recipe another time and continued my search.

I went to a recipe site that I'd found upon once upon a time and really like. I searched the site for chocolate cake recipes and found the recipe for this:


It has three rich, chocolatey layers:

And the frosting is buttery and chocolatey - almost a french butter cream, but without all the fuss:

My son took one bite and gave me a high five. I was happy.

You can find the recipes through the links below:

brownie - like cake which I'll try later

wonderful, chocolatey birthday cake which made my son smile

And the recipe site that I found this wonderful cake on is called Simply Recipes. All the recipes that I've tried from this site have been very good.