The Cake You Want

Festive, no?

This is my current favorite quick cake. It’s the rich red-brown color of Devil’s food cake, chewily chocolaty, and with that almost preternatural moistness that I usually associate with a banner on a box that says “Pudding in the mix!” Speaking of which: it is more or less as difficult and as tasty as cake-mix cake, and I mean that in the best possible way. Seriously. My oven takes 6 minutes to preheat to 350—and I end up having to wait, because the batter is already in the pan. No creaming (there’s no butter), no adding the eggs one at a time (there are no eggs), no alternating with the milk (there’s no milk). It’s just you and your whisk, and it means that if you’re like me, constantly trolling for dinner invitations, and someone finally says, “Fine, but bring dessert,” then you can be out the door with a still-hot cake 41 minutes later. Which is all I need.

But this is how I really like it. It gets that kind of sticky top that I really admire on a piece of cake.

The Cake You Want

Active time: 5 minutes

Total time: 41 minutes

This is very gently adapted from a recipe on epicurious called “Easiest Chocolate Cake,” that I got as a dirty photocopy from my friend Jonathan, but that seems to come from a book called Organic and Chic by Sarah Magid. All I did was remove the word “organic” from each ingredient (but please, do consider it), change the directions a hair (e.g. I like to make it in one large pan), and, oddly, given the whole “organic” thing, add the spelt flour. Look, that’s how I am. I dare you to make this and use the spelt flour and imagine this couldn’t be cake from a mix. And I don’t mean the flaxy kind of cake mix either.

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup spelt flour or whole-wheat pastry flour (or another cup of white flour)

2 cups sugar

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup canola oil

2 teaspoons white vinegar

2 cups cold water

Heat the oven to 350. Butter and flour one 9- or 10- by 13-inch pan or two 8- or 9-inch round cake pans, or place liners in 2 muffin pans for 24 cupcakes. Or use that insanely gross PAM baking spray (Now with real flour!) that I love.

In a large bowl, sift (or, um, whisk, because you’re lazy) the dry ingredients together.

In a medium bowl (or large measuring cup), measure the vanilla extract, oil, vinegar, and cold water.

Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until the dry ingredients disappear, but before you’d win a prize for world's longest mixing.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan(s) and bake until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, about 35 minutes for the big pan, 30 minutes for the layers, and 24 minutes for the cupcakes.

Cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack to cool—or leave it in the big pan.

Serve plain or with ice cream or whipped cream, or dust the cake with powdered sugar. Or frost, if you must.

I am almost sure that you already have the ingredients.

A whisk here. . .

. . . a measure there. . . 

. . . and I made the batter while you were reading photo captions.

You can let your kids lick the mixing bowl without that weird feeling of what if they get salmonella? even if you usually let them anyway.

Ready to bake.

Baked. I like to press the palm of my hand to the hot top of a cake. I don't know why, and I don't want to talk about it.

This was just for the photo, since we were bringing the cake to a friend's house. But what are you going to do--not really let the kid eat the cake? You have to let them. So I brought 2 pieces less than a whole cake.

Our whipped cream was behaving unpicturesquely.

Mythbusters is what they're watching.

It must have been some serious busted myths!