Sunday, July 25, 2010

Marshmallow frosting

What do you do when it's 9:30 at night, you're exhausted, you need to bake a cake, and you have no butter or powdered sugar?

Make wacky cake and marshmallow frosting!
(If you're looking for a healthy recipe, move along - this is not it.)

Wacky (aka crazy) cake doesn't use eggs and I think it got the title from using vinegar. Who would think to put vinegar in cake? It tastes decent although it doesn't taste strongly of chocolate. I've heard that some people add chocolate chips to the batter. This attempt didn't rise as well, but I've had it rise nicely in the past.

Wacky Cake:
1 1/2 C flour
1 C sugar
3 T cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp soda
1 T vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
5 T melted margarine or oil
1 C cold water

Sift dry ingredients into a pan or bowl. Make a well in the center and add vinegar, vanilla, and margarine/oil. Pour cold water over ingredients and mix well, but don't overstir. Pour into a greased and floured 9 x 13 inch pan. Bake 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

For the frosting, I found an old-fashioned recipe.

Marshmallow Frosting:
2 egg whites
4 T sugar
1 C sugar
4 T water

Beat egg whites until stiff, add 4 T sugar; set aside. Boil 1 C sugar and 4 T water over medium heat until it threads (about 5 minutes). Add gradually to egg whites, beating until mixture reaches spreading consistency.


Egg whites and sugar
Sugar syrup boiling
Here's where you learn from my mistakes. Choose a pan with a good handle, so you can hold it slightly tipped for a long time without burning your knuckles or pouring so slowly that the sugar ends up hardening in the pan.

(Huge chunk of syrup that hardened before I could even scrape it out)
Also make sure not to pour the syrup onto the beaters, or you will get syrup stuck on the mixer itself, and frosting flung onto your shirt and all up your arm.

It looks great when it's done though!

I wasn't sure how much it would make. You can see here how thick it was when spread on a 9 x 13 cake. Definitely plenty.
I used chocolate chips to spell out my message. The cake itself isn't that impressive, but it was pretty good paired with the frosting. We agreed the frosting is a make-again recipe.

3 comments:

Golda said...

I stumbled upon your blog a while back and enjoy reading it. I've recently started trying to bake bread so I like to hear about all the types you make.

Also, I LOVE wacky cake! We used to eat it all the time as kids. I probably liked it so much because my mom always let us kids make it and we didn't need any help. I think I'm going to have to make one this week now.

Amy said...

Cherish, where in the world do you learn all these amazing things? I think if I didn't have butter or powdered sugar to make cake, I'd either borrow or give up and make something else.

Jaime said...

My MIL's chocolate cake recipe has vinegar in it. It also has no eggs, so maybe it's a chemical reaction thing? Who knows, but kudos to you for being creative.