Easy Chocolate Cake by Maya Corrigan Gluten-Free #recipe

Happy Presidents’ Day! I’m sharing a recipe for a cake our first president would have liked. Records from Washington’s Mount Vernon home show that he was a chocolate lover. He received his first order for 20 pounds of chocolate from England in 1758, and his last order for 50 pounds three months before he died in 1799. 

Here’s some trivia about the other president we celebrate today. Lincoln was a big fan of Poe’s stories and wrote a detective story himself. In 1846 the Quincy Whig published "A Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder," described as a "murder mystery by Abraham Lincoln." You can read more about Lincoln’s story on my website and find a link there to his story.

Now for the chocolate cake with a crunchy top. The basic cake requires only five ingredients. Other ingredients are optional. To make the cake, I adapted Genevieve Ko's recipe published in the New York Times.

Ingredients

3/4 cup (12 Tbsp) unsalted butter cut in pieces, and another tablespoon or so as needed for buttering the cake pan
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips or a mix of chips and dark chocolate
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs
Optional flavoring: 1 tsp pure vanilla extract, coffee liqueur, or dark rum
Optional decoration: powdered sugar

 

Butter the bottom and sides of an 8-inch springform pan generously.

If you don’t have that type of pan, line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch cake pan with overhanging foil. Generously butter the foil on the bottom and sides of the pan.

Simmer a few inches of water in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the chocolate to a large heatproof bowl and set it in or over the water. When the chips start melting, stir the chocolate until it’s smooth. Turn off the heat and add the butter, stirring gently until it’s melted. Add the cocoa and stir it in until the mixture is smooth. Remove the bowl from the pan.

OR

Melt the chocolate in a microwave safe bowl for 15 seconds at a time, stirring it after each 15-second interval until the chocolate is melted. Stir until it’s smooth. Add the butter, stir until it has melted, and then add the cocoa, stirring until smooth.  

Stir in the granulated sugar until it’s totally mixed into the chocolate. Then add the eggs one by one, beating after each one is added. Stir in an optional flavoring if using.

Put all the batter in the buttered pan, scraping the sides as needed. Smooth the top with a spoon.

 

Bake the cake for 40-50 minutes. The top should look dry and cracked. The cake is done when a toothpick inserted two inches from the edge of the pan comes out clean.  

After cooling the pan on a rack, remove the sides of the springform pan or lift the cake from the pan with overhanging foil.

 

Since the top of the cake will look crackly, you may want to sprinkle it with powdered sugar for a better appearance. Though it's not attractive, the crunchy top gives the cake a unique texture. 

I used a doily on top of the cake when I sprinkled powdered sugar so that it made a pattern. Slice and serve the cake warm or at room temperature. Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.

READERS: Do you have a favorite chocolate dessert?

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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