Cocoa Cup Cakes - Or, Devil's Food Cake?

I'm still in a cake-baking mood, and since Annette mentioned Devil's Food Cake in the last post, I think it's time to try it out!  Devil's Food Cake is such a decadent treat.  It's no surprise she made it to celebrate her anniversary.  The fact that she made it in rural China in 1943 just blows my mind.

Unfortunately, the only chocolate cake recipe in her diary is for Cocoa Cup Cakes.  I have yet to find a definitive answer to what differentiates chocolate cake from Devil's Food, so maybe that recipe is Annette's version.  I doubled her recipe, then used a modern-day Devil's Food Cake recipe (from Ina Garten) to modify Annette's recipe as needed.  Kind of like in Jurassic Park when they used amphibian DNA to fill in the gaps of the dino-DNA.  Here is Annette's recipe.

Cocoa Cup Cakes

6 tablesp. fat

2 cups sugar

1 cup milk

2 eggs

3 cups flour

6 teaspoons baking powder

2/3 cup cocoa

vanilla

No instructions - just a list of ingredients.  As always, Annette's recipes leave me with more questions than answers.  First of all, the amount of fat is strangely low, compared to the sugar and flour amounts.  Also, it just calls for 'fat'.  Her other recipes specify butter or lard - maybe they are interchangeable.  I chose butter, since that's what I had, and I bumped up the amount to match Ina's recipe.  Another oddity is the amount of leavening compared to the other ingredients.  Ina's recipe calls for one teaspoon each baking powder and baking soda, but Annette's required six teaspoons of baking powder!  I am always stumped by the type of flour she used.  Was it wheat, like the bran muffins?  Or something else entirely?  My guess is that she needed the extra leavening to lighten up the flour.  I decided to go with cake flour, just for something different.

I used Annette's lower sugar amount and Ina's higher egg amount (using large instead of extra-large eggs to offset the amounts a bit).  I swapped out Annette's milk for Ina's sour cream, and dissolved the cocoa in a bit of hot coffee before adding it to the batter.  Plus, I added the salt from Ina's recipe, to balance out the sweetness.  I made the cakes in large cupcake-style wrappers to mimic Annette's cup cakes.  I also made my favorite chocolate buttercream - Billy's Chocolate Buttercream from a Martha Steward episode (you can find the recipe here).  I must admit, I didn't have semisweet chocolate on hand, so I tried making the icing first with a dark chocolate cocoa powder/butter/sugar combo.  The result was tasty, but looked a mess!  It was grainy and thick, with a grey/black color.  I tried to mask it with silver sprinkles, but ended up making a new batch later.  I'll include a picture here, so you can see my disaster in all its glory.

Just like Annette, I messed up the icing.  I tried to use what I had in my pantry, and the end result wasn't what I wanted.  Like grandmother, like granddaughter, I guess!

Behold!  Annette's Cocoa Cup Cakes + Ina Garten's Devil's Food Cake =

Miranda's Devil's Food Mini-Cakes!

The ingredients. A bit of Annette, plus a bit of Ina.

Mini-cake wrappers all lined up. These are great for individual cakes - especially when you are worried you might accidentally eat an entire layer cake by yourself.

Creaming butter and sugar.

Chocolate!! Dissolving the cocoa powder with the coffee made it much easier to integrate into the butter/sugar/egg mixture.

Dividing the batter into the mini-cake wrappers.

As you can see, the results were very different for each pan. I rotated the pans halfway through, but sill got mixed results. Also, I am still an over-filler. The cakes were tender, but a little too floury.

The first icing attempt. If you need to make a cake that looks like asphalt, I would recommend this method. Not so pretty, but still delicious!

This batch looks much better.

Piped with a star tip! Fun little mini-cakes!