If any of you follow my I Sing In The Kitchen Facebook page, you’ll know that I had a pretty miserable afternoon yesterday.
Imagine a 1.5 liter bottle of wine broken on a counter. Under that counter are bookshelves that contain about 1/3 of my cookbooks.
Wine soaked cookbooks. Sticky counter and floors. And you know wine never smells that great when it isn’t in a glass being enjoyed.
What makes a kitchen disaster better?
Cake.
This cake is originally named Chocolate Sybil Cake. I couldn’t find out why the “Sybil”, so I thought syrup seemed a more descriptive title even though it is packed with personality.
If chocolate cake is up your alley, you will love this dense, gooey cake with its cooked pecan-chocolate icing. The frosting kind of crisps up, not unlike a glaze, as it cools, which contrasts so well with the moist cake layer.
Chocolate Syrup Cake With Chocolate Pecan Icing
Chocolate Syrup Cake
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (16-ounce) can chocolate syrup (recommended: Hershey’s)
Chocolate Pecan Icing (recipe follows)
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350℉ . Grease and flour a 13 x 9 x 2-inch pan.
2. Using an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.
3. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together in another bowl. Add to creamed mixture, continuing to beat. Add vanilla and chocolate syrup to batter and mix well.
4. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Just before cake is done, prepare icing.
5. Pour icing over warm cake.
Chocolate Pecan Icing
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup evaporated milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped pecans
Directions:
1. Combine butter, chocolate chips, sugar and evaporated milk in a saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Continue to boil for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring the mixture constantly.
2. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla and nuts. Pour over warm cake.
Recipe from Cooking With Paula Deen Magazine
Psychonautica Chaotica (now that is a band name) not only create atmospheric, interesting music, but they have a song titled Spilled Wine.
Apropos, no?
Check out Psychonautica Chaotica on Facebook and Bandcamp, where you can get the music.
Cheers!
I know I’m late to the party here, but this is so close to my grandmother’s chocolate syrup cake recipe! I haven’t made it in a while, but she taught it to me when I was in about seventh grade. The thing to remember with this cake is that it’s better the next day. The glaze soaks into the cake, and the corner pieces are a chocoholic’s dream. One thing you can do to reduce the amount of sugar is to use cocoa powder instead of chocolate chips. I mix the cocoa with the sugar to keep it from lumping up as bad. Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa is amazing in this.
I hope you were able to get your cookbooks usable again. I’m a bibliophile as well as a chocoholic. I hate hearing about books being damaged!
Thanks so much for all of your tips! You also reminded me that I need to make this cake again soon.
My cookbooks made an amazing recovery. Because I was right there when the spill happened I was able to immediately pull them out from the shelves and open them onto mounds of towels, where they dried out quite successfully. (HaHa! “Dried out”, those alco-sloshed books!)