emergency cake

kindergarden graduate

I loved the name of this cake when I came across the recipe, at the front of the cake section in the America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. And one afternoon, the day of the boy's last day of school at the end of June, in fact, I turned to it to make the chocolate cake he wanted as a celebration cake. So I whipped it up, ignoring the strangeness of using a lot of mayonnaise in a cake. It was good. I whipped up some blue buttercream and then the boy found some baker's chocolate squares, food colouring tubes and chocolate chips. I drew the shark on the blue icing with icing gel leftover from the tank cake in January and the boy did the rest.

I avoided giving out squares with big hunks of baking chocolate on them when we first had the cake, complete with candles and accompanied by the song "Happy last day of school" sung, funnily enough, to the tune of Happy Birthday. My husband later snuck the squares off the cake, wiped them off and sequestered them in the freezer. (Which, if you've seen my freezer, you'll know is a fantastic hiding place for things, never to be seen again).

All to say, that if you need to whip up a quick chocolate cake and happen to have a cup of mayonnaise on hand plus a lot of cocoa powder, this is the recipe for you. And here, school starts back on Tuesday, so I had to post these pictures before then.