Evening Cake

Well it seems like it's finally sweatshirt season again. There's still a few beach days left of course, and probably a few days where even the humble long sleeve shirt is going to be too much. But we're rounding the corner of the year, and listen, I'm not trying to steer into melancholy here, I'm just logging in to say that starting now it's fairly safe in the kitchen to bake things without remorse. You can now fill the kitchen with warm smells and actual heat without asking yourself "why am I doing this now" or saying in disgust "I should've just made a big salad". For the sweatshirt and stove fans on the timeline I thought I'd blast out again this recipe for a pretty good chocolate cake.

Though I made some slight edits, this recipe was originally printed in Mothers News #41, the Evening Edition. I don't know if newspapers even have an evening edition anymore but when I do a project I like to nail down as many of the classic riffs as I can, so "Evening Edition" was long on my todo list, and I finally did it, with what wound up as the last issue. I've recently made all back issues of Mothers News available online, they're in the castle library. If you'd like to read more of this one, or any other issue, I'll leave a link below.

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from Mothers News 41 "the Evening Edition"

Please note: in the same way that you can eat breakfast for dinner sometimes, you can eat desert for breakfast sometimes. When reaching for this or any cake at daybreak, I like to compliment it with miso soup, coffee, and a large glass of water. Ideally the miso soup has an egg floating it it, either poached in the soup or soft-boiled separately. This breakfast (coffee, water, cake, miso soup with egg) is called "Wonderful Set" and is highly recommended.

Frosting this cake is up to you, that is not included in the recipe. You can choose not to frost this cake, that's a mature feeling. Otherwise frost it how you may. IF you're serving this to kids AND you don't have much of a frosting game THEN garnish with plastic dinosaurs AFTER the cake is cooled. This should be disruptive enough for them not to notice that this isn't a platonic "child's view of cake". If they balk at this, then I'm sorry but your kids are smart enough to not be fooled and dumb enough to not instinctively move towards warmth-- they are in the false mechanical daylight of closed-use unreason, truly the abode of the damned. Hold your breath, cross your fingers and crack a raw egg over their head.

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links / misc

• As promised, here's the link to all the Mothers News back issues, even the fabled "Dream Issue": [link]. Mothers News was a mostly monthly newspaper I wrote, designed, published, and distributed for free from 2010 to 2015. Featuring comics from many great contributors and the occasional recipe.
• I checked in on cake photographer Megan Hall, seems like she's doing good-- recently she hosted a pandemic podcast via the Brown University School of Public Health: [link]. Megan used to be on NPR, which is a cool level of fame-- sometimes she'd show up at parties and people would be SHOCKED. I mean there's more famous people that would sometimes pop in to the gig but you really don't expect these drive-time voices to show up!

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