Most of my friends had stay-at-home moms who had freshly baked homemade chocolate chip cookies or a triple layered Devils Food Cake waiting for them when they got home from elementary school
I was greeted by my father, (my mother was the main breadwinner when I was growing up) who either pointed me to the refrigerator so I could make my own chocolate milk, or tested the boundaries – opening up a can of chocolate covered ants or crickets and daring me to try to them.
He’d spent most of his childhood from seven to fourteen riding the rails, eating in hobo camps and foraging in the woods.
“I discovered early that if you put chocolate on anything, you can eat it,” he told me.
Mom took over mealtimes on the weekends. Her desserts consisted of peach kuchen, pineapple upside down cake, strawberry shortcake and anything else she could make with Bisquick. If any of us desired something chocolate it was usually sated by eating Hostess cupcakes, Oreo cookies or a Baby Ruth candy bar, or if we were flush – a trip to Harvey’s Hamburgers for a chocolate shake or Dairy Queen for a chocolate-dipped cone.
By 1959 my brothers and I came to the conclusion that if we wanted to survive childhood we were going to have to learn to cook. That Christmas the folks bought me a copy of Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls.
The very first recipe in the book is Cocoa Fudge Cake. It took a while and the result was really good. The book also suggested that it was “easy, and good, too, when you make it with Betty Crocker Chocolate Devils Food Cake Mix”. I made one a week or two later and found the results almost identical. And, for a family that had to count pennies, much cheaper.
Eventually I became a good “from scratch” cook and made a successful go of it as a caterer. But, baking wasn’t really my thing. I found two guys just starting out in the business to do the baking for me – Walter Goetzler from Freeport Bakery and Rick’s Dessert Diner.
It wasn’t until last year that I made another chocolate cake from scratch, and I have to tell you it was the best cake I’ve ever tasted. I adapted a recipe from the back of a can of Hershey’s powdered chocolate. It took three hours to make and another four hours sitting time before it was ready to eat. I haven’t made another one since.
I figure if I find it hard to carve out time to create a time-consuming chocolate dessert, you’re most likely in the same boat, so what follows are a number of 1,2,3 chocolate recipes that take three ingredients and just about that many steps. Most of the recipes use ingredients you can find at any grocery store. The rest of the story is on the following PDF"s. Click on them to make them large enough to read.
