Nancy's Chocolate Cake & Custard Gelato

Every once in a while I get a craving for a particular taste of something. The craving may be for pizza, or spaghetti and meatballs, or sushi, or my fabulous frozen margaritas. Last weekend it was chocolate.

And I had the perfect excuse to make a chocolate cake: Father's Day!

I looked through all my fancy cookbooks and couldn't find anything that sounded right to me. Then I remembered Our Family Favorites. This was a collection of recipes put together by one of my sisters-in-law originally in 1991. She asked everyone for a few favorite and family recipes and then took the time and effort and expense to type everything out and bind them all together in a booklet. Then she gave each family one for Christmas. Fourteen years later she did the same thing with the help of her daughter and the result was an expanded edition with at least two or three times the recipes of the original version. This time I put all the pages in those plastic sleeves to better protect them and then put them in a binder. In that book I found "Nancy's Chocolate Cake". It sounded like what I was looking for.

First edition on the left, second and current edition on the right.

Before I continue I would like to make one thing clear. I'm not a good cake maker. Oh, my cakes come out okay. They usually taste pretty good, but they don't usually look very pretty!

Nancy's Chocolate Cake

3/4 C butter; 1 3/4 C sugar; 2 eggs; 1 t vanilla; 2 C flour; 3/4 C Hershey's cocoa; 1 1/4 t baking soda; 1/2 t salt; 1 1/3 C water

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla; beat at medium speed for one minute. Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in a bowl; add alternating with the water to the creamed mixture. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured 8" cake pans, bake at 350 degrees for 35 - 40 minutes. Cool and frost.

Chocolate Frosting

3/4 C cocoa; 4 C powdered sugar; 1/2 C butter; 1 t vanilla; 1/2 C evaporated milk

Mix cocoa and sugar. Cream part of mixture with butter, blend in vanilla and half of the milk. Add remaining cocoa mixture and blend; add remaining milk and beat. Frost when cake is cool.

(I added chopped pecans pressed into the side of the cake. I would say it's for the texture factor but the truth is I was trying to hide the extreme crookedness. It didn't help.)

Everybody knows you have to have ice cream with cake, right? So in trying to make a "healthier" version of ice cream I checked the internet for gelato recipes and found this simple Custard Gelato. In case you didn't know, gelato is Italian ice cream and has more whole milk, less cream, and usually less sugar than regular ice cream.

Once it's sliced and on a plate you can't tell that the cake is crooked!

So much for all the good my 2 mile walk did for me on Sunday!