Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Frosting

I recently (as in the last six months) made a homemade chocolate cake. It didn't look this chocolate-y, it didn't taste very chocolate-y, and it tasted like you would imagine a homemade cake to taste. At least like I imagined it would taste, which was not so good. I'm used to a boxed chocolate cake mix.

Funny thing is, just a couple of weeks ago I made a boxed chocolate cake I had in my cabinet and was thinking how I wished I had a good recipe for a delicious chocolate cake. You know, so when I wanted to have chocolate cake I didn't have to have all those preservatives and could just have all those homemade ingredients and lots of white sugar and white flour, which isn't supposed to be good for you at all.

But cocoa and antioxidants — they are supposed to be good for you. So maybe they cancel out all that white sugar and white flour. I'm just going with that.

Well, a week after I had my little "wish I had a homemade cake recipe" thought, our friends brought over chocolate cake for small group. They brought the recipe, which happens to be off the box of Hershey's Cocoa. Here it is, along with the frosting recipe, also from the box. Enjoy!

Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cups Hershey's Cocoa
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans. Put water on to boil.

Combine dry ingredients in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla; beat on medium speed 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin). Pour into pans.

Bake 30-35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes; removed from pans to wire racks. Cool completely. Frost with "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Frosting.

"Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Frosting

1 stick butter
2/3 cup Hershey's Cocoa
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

Melt butter. Stir in cocoa. Alternately add powdered sugar and milk, beating on medium speed to spreading consistency. Add more milk if needed. Stir in vanilla. Makes about 2 cups.

1. The batter was thin. Chatty said I should pour some of the water off the top!
2. It took me about 37-38 minutes to cook, but I did open the oven at 30 minutes and 35 minutes to stick toothpicks in one of the cakes to check.
3. I didn't add any additional milk to the frosting. I wanted to, but I went ahead and added in the vanilla first. It was okay then. But now that I'm looking at the recipe I think I might have made a mistake and added 2 tsp instead of 1 tsp to the frosting. I can't remember and I don't know why I'm thinking that. Maybe it's because of the cake. Oh, well, it was good, and you may or may not need a little smidge of milk.