Chocolate Black Out Cake: Making Memories and a Mess!

My parents are visiting for a few days, so I invited my mom, a true chocoholic, to be a guest blogger for me today! Enjoy!

My husband & I are “food show junkies”! One of our favorite shows is America’s Test Kitchen. We don’t keep or make all the recipes, but do like to see the variations and the science behind why certain ingredients are used for various results.

We were watching recently when the name, Chocolate Blackout Cake grabbed my attention! It was a signal to grab a pencil & paper and start writing the recipe in my own shorthand.

Then, I decided to bring the recipe with me and experiment with the grandkids.

This is a 3 layer dense cake with a pudding frosting and crumbled cake for a textured topping. It is a complicated cake, but delicious!

Chocolate Blackout Cake

Mix together in a sauce pan 1 1/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/4 cup cornstarch & 1/4 teaspoon salt.

Add 2 cups Half & Half & 1 cup milk (we substituted undiluted condensed milk for both of these ingredients).

Stir in 6 oz grated unsweetened chocolate (next time we will use a chocolate with more fat, which will make the pudding thicker when it cools). Cook this mixture until the chocolate melts and the edges bubble. Stir it constantly!

Add 2 teaspoons vanilla. Pour into a bowl & cover the top of the pudding with wax paper to prevent a “skin”. Refrigerate for 2 hours. This will be both the filling and the frosting!

For the cake: Whisk together in a bowl & set aside: 1 1/2 cup flour, 2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon soda, & 1/2 teaspoon salt.

To “bloom” the flavor of the cocoa melt 8 Tablespoons butter in a saucepan that is large enough to mix the cake batter. Add 3/4 cup cocoa and cook 1 minute, stirring constantly!

Remove from heat. Stir in 1 cup coffee, (Coffee makes chocolate flavor richer), 1 cup milk, 1 cup granulated sugar, and 1 cup brown sugar.

Whisk in 2 eggs & 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Whisk in the dry ingredients.

Divide dough between two 8 ” round cake pans that have been greased & floured. Bake 350 degrees until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool for 15 minutes. Remove cakes to a rack to cool.

To assemble the cake: Split each layer in half starting on an edge and slicing around and towards the center until you are all the way through. This gives you 4 layers.

Pick out the best 3 and crumble the 4th into a bowl. Spread l cup of the pudding/frosting/filling between each layer and on the top & sides. Spread the crumbled 4th layer over the top & sides.

Be sure to refrigerate!

We decided to experiment a little and put ours into one 15 1/2 X 10 inch jelly roll pan. After it was baked we let it cool in the pan (mainly because we had other projects to deal with and forgot it for a little while!)

Then we cut the rectangle into fourths and crumbled one of the fourths for the topping. We layered the other 3 with the pudding/frosting/filling.

It sounds good on paper, but our cake did not bake evenly so the layers were different heights and our pudding did not get thick enough (maybe because of the lower fat content of the chocolate?)

Anyway, our layers started to slip & slide! Instead of a Black Out cake, we had a Mud Slide cake!

No problem, we got out some plastic drinking straws and poked them down through the layers in strategic locations along the cake and cut them off even with the top of the cake. Then with a lot of laughter and licking we proceeded with the frosting and the crumbs.

It held together just long enough for a quick photo, then we quickly started slicing and eating before the mudslide hit the countertop!

It might have been interesting to look at, and hard to contain, but it was very delicious! Finger-licking good! And so rich that it gave us a “chocolate high”!

We made both memories and calories together and that’s one of my favorite ways to spend quality time with my grandkids!

Until next time,
The Chocolate Lady’s Mama