Texas Chocolate Cake

This recipe has been a family staple as far back as I can remember.  We’ve always called it “Texas Chocolate Cake.”  It also appears in The Hereford Cookbook, a cookbook my mom edited as a fundraiser for the American Hereford Auxiliary around 1988.  The recipe in the book is “Quick Chocolate Cake” by Katheryn Steen of Texas.  This is a really fast, easy, GOOD recipe, complete with icing.  The key is lots of butter and lots of cocoa.  To serve this at parties, I like to cut it up into finger-food sized chunks and stack it up on a footed platter.

Without further ado, here’s the cake recipe:

Quick Chocolate Cake

Melt in a saucepan:

1 cup butter

1 cup water

3.5 tablespoons cocoa

Bring to a full boil.

Add to:

2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

1 tsp. salt

Add:

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tsp. soda

1 tsp. vanilla

Pour in greased and floured 9×13 pan.  Bake 25 minutes at 425 degrees.

Here’s the batter as I mixed the melted portion in with the dry ingredients.

Here’s the baked cake.  Looks like I left a few cocoa lumps unmixed.  Oops. I used Pam with Flour for Baking instead of greasing and flouring the pan and it worked great.

And now for the icing recipe.  What I like about this is that you can just make it in the same saucepan you melted the water, butter and cocoa in earlier, without even rinsing it out, because many of the ingredients for the icing are similar.

Quick Chocolate Cake Icing

Melt the following ingredients in saucepan and bring almost to a boil:

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup milk

3.5 tablespoons cocoa

Add:

1 lb. powdered sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup chopped pecans

Beat well.  Spread over warm cake.

Spreading the icing on the warm cake allows the icing to soak in a little bit and run evenly down the sides of the cake pan.  Once it has cooled, there’s a nice semi-crunchy icing edge around the whole cake — delicious!

Here’s what the cake looks like when it’s ready.  It’s so good, and the best part is that this whole recipe takes about 35 minutes from start to finish.  Enjoy!