It is clearly some sort of oversight on my part that I haven’t gotten to this before because no annals of my cooking life could ever be complete without at least a single mention of one of the greatest cakes I was introduced to growing up: the Sh*t Cake. The Sh*t Cake, you see, is a lighter-than-air chocolate roll cake with whipped cream that my mother would make each and every Passover. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever made a Yule Log or other such roulade cake knows, they crack and sever easily and often, and can be mighty frustrating because of this. A nice, sweet person like my mother, who otherwise echews displays of gutter mouth might even be so irritated by say the fourth or fifth crack or so to curse aloud while her (frankly, precious) 7-year-old daughter watches, and comes in turn to rename the cake.
But despite the annoyance of making the cake, we still go at it year after year (I’ve made it too, and it has indeed kept its nickname in the process) because the cake is really one of the best in the world. It manages to have an intense, pronounced bittersweet chocolate flavor but none of the heft of your typical flourless chocolate cake (although I love them, they are so often like gigantic truffles and less like something you can eat more than two bites of without running your fork through sauce, fruit or gulping down quantities of water). Besides having no flour, it also has no butter, milk, cream or chemical leaveners. Frankly, if you have a bag of good chocolate pieces, a dozen eggs, some sugar and salt, you could make this right this very moment, though you might need to dash to the store for some heavy cream for whipping. Mwa-ha-ha, consider chocolate cakes as you know them banished.
Many, many egg yolks are beaten to a thick, pale ribbon with sugar and a pinch of salt, melted, cooled chocolate is added and finally a gigantic cloud of furiously whipped egg whites is carefully folded in from a separate bowl, creating an impossibly light batter that is poured into a greased and parchment-lined and greased-again cooking sheet and baked for just 20 minutes. Were you rolling the cake, you’d let it cool (it doesn’t take long) covered with damp paper towels, then sprinkle unsweetened cocoa on it and flip it onto a large sheet of waxed paper before covering it with whipped cream and beginning to alternately curse and pray to the Let My Cake Not Break Gods. But you may have noticed that I skipped the foul language, the sweating and the frustration this time around and make it into a simple layer cake, partly because I find the log version somewhat diminutive (good for eight, maybe ten people but, uh, being a brown log not exactly the most ta-da presentation), partly because there’s something about a stacked layer cake that screams celebration but mostly because I just don’t love my friends enough to sweat, curse and pray over a cake when there is an easier way to go. Obviously.
It was a raving success. Busting out the middle-school math equations involving multiplying things by pi, Alex and I figured that by doubling the recipe, we could make 4 9-inch circles of the same approximate thickness as the roll cake, that is, about one inch. To make the cake assembly easier, I froze the layers until stiff (takes an hour or less), but that was the beginning and end of the trickery. It was a cinch to make, a cinch to put together and oh, you want to hear about the eating? The cake dissolves in your mouth. Dissolves. Ceases to exist in solid form. And that should be all you need to know.
Update: I–for once–put our New York Times Select account to use and dug and dug until I found the original recipe my mom uses on their website… in a scanned original, no less! The 1975 article, For His Sweet Tooth, had the deck, “Chocolate-flavored desserts are a favorite of most men.” The cake was promised to satisfy the most discriminating Dad on Father’s Day. Called “Heavenly Chocolate Roll,” the only differences I see in the recipe were that it called for semisweet, not bittersweet chocolate, there is perhaps a tablespoon more sugar, and it calls for 3 tablespoons of strong, cold coffee to be mixed with the melting chocolate. This is a great idea (though a tablespoon of instant espresso would work as well) as coffee always brings out the best in chocolate, without giving it an actual coffee flavor. The whipped cream filling is made with ¼ cup more heavy cream (not a bad idea; never too much!) and has only 2 tablespoons (not 3) of powdered sugar. It is flavored with ½ teaspoon of vanilla. Finally, it suggests that the top of the waxed or parchment paper is greased as well as the pan itself. It may not be completely necessary with parchment, but you can never be too safe. I actually did this anyway, out of habit. It suggests that the cake can be rolled in either direction, for a longer slimmer or shorter thicker roll. Good to know, eh?
Continued after the jump »
