high-bar baking

I have a weakness. 

Just one, I know. Practically perfect in every way.

Kidding, of course. But if I had to pick my greatest weakness, in the “keeping myself away from baked goods” realm, it might be this one. This, my friends, is Texas Sheet Cake. 

You may know it as Irma’s Brownies, but it is not a brownie. I also have never heard one person refer to it as “Farm Girl’s Sheet Cake,” which is how Jill Schwalbe Means and Jamie Greenland Gorey title it in their wonder of a recipe book. This will always be, to me, Texas Sheet Cake. 

I don’t pretend to understand the science of it. So I’m just going to call it “sufficiently advanced technology.” AKA… magic. Why does boiling both the chocolate/water/oil base of the cake and the butter/milk/chocolate combo for the frosting do what it does? What’s going on under the surface? Behind the scenes? 

Something great, that’s what. I almost don’t even want to know. Don’t break the spell for me. Just let me keep citing my incantations and being as delightfully wicked as I want to be.

It’s soft, it’s tender, it’s chocolate. The frosting is different and sweet but not too sweet (maybe a little, ok? But only in the best way!). You can hardly scrape it out of the pan because it’s so moist and so fragile. It’s perfect, and I don’t have any other words.

Truly, a cake I would blow all my friendships to sit in hell with. This is always the warm-up to my actual birthday cake (it’s coming!), and it’s everything that’s good and right in the world. 

I tried freezing the cake for a hot spell to set the icing (it really is more like icing!) on top, to make it easier to cut. It wasn’t a godsend, but it was an improvement. I want to use natural cocoa powder in the future. For the uninitiated, that has nothing to do with its sourcing; natural is in contrast to Dutch processed, which processes the cocoa with an alkali to remove some of its acidity. The resulting powder is darker, richer, less bitter, less strident. It’s what I prefer almost all of the time. But I think here I want the original, the cocoa-ier version, the acid. 

And for the love of all things good, do make sure you dump this on your friends. Eating a whole pan is for your younger years, darling.