Today we bought a car (at one of the worst and most expensive possible times to buy a car) to replace the car one of our children ran into a pillar in a parking garage by “pressing the wrong pedal.” Our mechanic, who had agreed ahead of time to take a look and see what could be done, looked under the hood and said “OH. Oh. Call your insurance.” Happily this is a 10-year-old car with 160,000 miles on it. Still.
Then we came home and completed the FAFSA, the college financial aid form that, for example, says you can import your IRS tax information so you don’t have to fill it all out manually, and then makes you dig out your IRS tax information anyway for the few fields you DO have to fill out manually; and then says that after you sweat your way through the first FAFSA, you can at least click a box to automatically fill out a second FAFSA form for another child and they’ll duplicate all the information so all you’ll have to do is sign it—but when you do that option, it for whatever reason does NOT fill out all the duplicate information and in fact you have to do it all again, including re-importing your IRS tax information and then re-filling-out the IRS tax information that for some reason was not part of the import. Also the FAFSA site is very very very slow and laggy right now, and one child had to fill out their whole account information (including name, date of birth, Social Security number, security questions and answers) four times because each time they clicked “submit,” it just hung there with a little working-on-it circle, but never actually completed.
It was, in retrospect, not the right day to decide to make a cake from scratch.
Anyway, the reason I had to write “cake mix” on the list was not because I didn’t have cake mix on hand (rule one: ALWAYS HAVE CAKE MIX ON HAND, WHO KNOWS WHEN YOU MIGHT NEED TO CELEBRATE), but because I needed to replace the cake mix I used: I made a yellow cake, and in order to compensate for not having room temperature eggs I used hot water, this doesn’t seem like it has to be SO HARD. Then I made one of my favorite mixes, a brownie/cookie thing. (Paul, unwisely entering the kitchen: “Why are you panting?” Swistle: “I’m BUSY.”) At this point the cake is out of the oven and the brownie/cookie thing is in the oven, and I am feeling calmer.
I feel like this is the cake recipe you need. Both for it’s brevity and it’s amazing taste.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/jd3hf3/known_only_as_nanas_devils_food_best_chocolate/
This cake is AMAZING. It is the only cake I make from scratch and everyone LOVES it. I do a mocha glaze-type frosting for it, and last year I made one and added crumbled-up Ferrero Rocher candy on top and sold it for several hundred dollars in a dessert auction for charity.
SO GOOD.
Some days are like that. I’m impressed you even tried the cake!
My 7 year old car with only 80,000 miles was totaled 2 weeks ago after a semi tried to merge into the interstate, sent my car spinning where another car hit my drivers door and I ended up crashed against a cement barrier. So needless to say I was suddenly in the market for a new car. And they are really hard to find. And you can’t get a deal. 7 years ago they offered low interest rates or a $3000 rebate. Now? Not a damn thing. And do you know how much a midsize domestic sedan with the medium trim level costs now? Over $31,000. And my old low mileage car with a medium trim level was running perfectly. I probably had at least 4 more years with it. And dealing with the semi’s insurance has been an exercise in frustration.
**I can complain about all of because no one was hurt. I went to the hospital but wasn’t even sore the next day and took one of the pain pills I got. So I was lucky. And the guy that hit me was lucky. Of course that makes me sadder because the old car did such a great job protecting me! My new car doesn’t seem so sturdy.
OH I HEAR YOU and also I am so glad you’re okay, that sounds extremely scary and dangerous. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the fragility and value of life, and the luckiness of continuing to live it, and then go right back into OMG NO DEALS AT ALL, AND TWICE WHAT WE PAID FOR THIS SEDAN JUST A FEW YEARS AGO, AND WE WERE LUCKY TO FIND ANYTHING AVAILABLE AT ALL, AND OUR OLD CAR WAS A RUNNING-BEAUTIFULLY TOYOTA CAMRY WITH RECENTLY-REPLACED PARTS AND A NEW WINDSHIELD AND WE WERE HOPING/PLANNING AT LEAST ANOTHER 40,000 MILES OUT OF IT AND NOW WE HAVE THIS CAR WE DIDN’T EVEN WANT IN A COLOR WE DON’T EVEN LIKE AND WE HAVE TO BE GRATEFUL WE HAVE IT!!
I dread the day we have to replace our 16 year old Prius. Oldest uses it to get to and from work when he’s not in school and I really don’t want to have a car payment. Our other cars are 6 years old and 10 years old so I’m hoping all of these vehicles can just hang in there for a few more years until Oldest graduates from college and gets a job so he can replace the Prius if something happens to it. Car shopping has always been terrible but these days it sounds even worse. BAH!
Switching gears, I’ve made a cake from scratch exactly once. It took twice as long and didn’t taste better than a box cake so I gave up and went back to box cakes and never looked back.
I love baking (and agree about the wordy recipes!), so just came to say: if you need room temp eggs, you can take eggs directly from the fridge and put them in a cup of hot water for a couple of minutes and then use them.
YES! And to speed up the room temperature butter you can either balance the stick on top of the cup of hot water or slice it into smaller pieces so it warms up quicker.
I make recipes from the Cake Doctor cookbook for birthdays. It’s always cake mix + a few extra ingredients and maybe a fancy frosting. That’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to making a cake from scratch.
Here I will share with you the Victoria Sponge cake recipe so many people in the UK have memorised. You do need two shallow sandwich tins but you can also make cupcakes. For each egg, you need two ounces each of self-raising flour, caster sugar and butter/margarine, then also a teaspoon of baking powder. So for a cake I’d make a three egg sponge with three eggs and six ounces of everything else. You can cream the butter and sugar first or you can just throw it all in together. Bake for 15 minutes or so or until a skewer comes out clean. Swap an ounce of flour for cocoa powder for a chocolate cake. Traditionally served with jam between the layers and icing sugar sifted on top but I usually add buttercream.
This is so kind for you to share and I’m semi-appalled at myself that as soon as I saw the word “ounce” I thought “too hard.”
I noped out at “self-raising.” 😬😅😂 North American ingredients are not the same as European/Australian, and I find trying to transpose recipes so iffy.
I hate to say it but Self Raising flour is pretty inexact – it has some leavening agent in it. If you are making a cake or sponge for 4-6 serves (a standard recipe) just add 1 tsp to plain flour and you are fine. It’s a mirage of difficulty!
1 tsp of baking powder – per regular recipe!
Anna – totally agree – spot on! UK recipe! 100%
My mother taught me at a young age “6, 6, 6 and 3”.
6 oz of butter, 6 oz of sugar, 6 oz of self raising flour (America has many things but NO self raising flour?!) (Add a tsp of baking powder to basically any SR flour recipe – it’s not that exact!) and 3 eggs.
Mix butter and sugar. Add eggs, Add flour. 2 cake pans. 180 C 15-20 mins until toothpick comes out clean.
Frost/Ice/Jam as desired. We always had jam and buttercream in the middle and icing or buttercream or icing sugar sprinkled on top.
My sister and I as small children could make it easily in the Kenwood Chef if we had stool access up to the counter. I preferred the ‘everything together’ method and my sister preferred the ‘beat each stage to oblivion’ method. Hers was really light and fluffy, and mine was more dense (just like me ;-) ). To each their own!
Highly recommend Recipe Tin Eats – she has lots of notes and explanation but if you ‘Print’ the recipe, you go directly to the basic information you want. She is amazing!
6oz is 170g – 170, 170, 170, 3 – not as easy but literally 2 numbers and likely 17 mins in the oven! I was raised oz and as an adult metric – it’s not lots of different quantities :-)
I have to ask, what is caster sugar?
Powdered sugar, if I remember correctly.
I think it’s ultrafine granulated sugar
I just bought a car too and in my city everywhere is charging over MSRP. I was lucky to get $500 under MSRP after a lot of research.
The FAFSA internet thing makes me twitchy. SO frustrating. Why can things not work like they should?!?!
And double eye roll to the room temperature ingredients. I did snort-laugh at, “Apparently I needed to start this cake process TWO WEEKS AGO” though. So true.
Uggghh car repair/replacement and insurance and FAFSA are like the trifecta of adulting frustration. We just spent $4k on our two vehicles to keep them running, such a boring way to spend money.
I don’t know if you want advice about the cake/recipe situation, but I highly recommend picking up an old Betty Crocker cookbook next time you see one at Goodwill or the library book sale. Mine is from the 70s and the baked good recipes are solid, plus they include such hate-readable commentary as “Maybe you woke up so full of good cheer that you wanted to share it with everyone by making banana bread!” The main dish recipes are questionable- casseroles and pimentos and French onion soup mix- but it’s a fun time capsule.
The second year my dad decided he needed to “help” me with the FAFSA we got audited and they sent letters to the house where we had to send in lots of extra forms.
Every other year I collected my parents tax returns and filled it out myself. No issues. As long as you don’t get audited, you’re ahead of the curve.
If it helps, I find most recipe sites have a “jump to recipe” button somewhere near the top these days. And +1 to getting room temperature eggs by sticking cold eggs in a bowl of hot water, although I’ve never really found a good solution for needing room temp butter (besides just giving up and using cold butter).
Also ughhh the car thing. I’m almost certainly going to have to buy a car sometime in the next year or so. Maybe the market will get better in 2023???
This is completely Not Approved and will supposedly Ruin The Recipe, but I just microwave my butter a bit to soften it when I need to and it’s NEVER been a problem.
If I have a little more time, I set it on top of the stove and turn the oven on. That’ll warm it fairly quickly.
I microwave my butter too, for just 10-15 seconds. I’m not baking souffles or anything fancy, but I have literally never had a single issue.
Agree, and sometimes I have accidentally left it in there too long and completely melted it… not only has it been far easier to beat, but the cake/cookies have turned out PERFECT
To soften cold butter: Fill a glass with boiling water and let it sit for a bit. Empty. Turn warm glass upside down over cold butter. Go off to do something else for a minute or two. Voilá—soft butter when you return!
I find that even if there is a jump to recipe link, if it’s one of the recipe websites that seem to exist mostly to serve you 16 pages of ads it can still be annoying to try to follow the recipe from my iPad: page constantly reloading, have to keep scrolling back to the right spot etc
I saw a recommendation recently for justtherecipe.com: you paste in the link and it returns… just the recipe
I tried that, and it seemed to work (on the recipe I tried, was not an exhaustive attempt). Brilliant! Thanks so much for sharing!
My workaround is to “print” the recipe to a pdf if the website has a print option. Usually removes the ads and as a bonus, the recipe is then saved as a pdf if I want to use it again.
oh this is a good idea
I made a from-scratch cake recently where, after I had finished combining the ingredients (from three different bowls, added together in varying fractional bits, alternating this way and that), and as I was at the point of pouring the batter into the pans, I suddenly discovered a small bowl of dry ingredients sitting on the counter. On the surface of which clearly sat the teaspoon-worth of baking soda and smaller amount of salt. Just to clarify, I had definitely added the bowl of dry ingredients into the batter already.
After a longer frozen pause than one would think possible, here’s what I did. I threw the extra bowl of dry ingredients into the trash. I re-measured the baking soda and salt directly into the (possibly) completed batter. I put the pans into the oven. It was not a happy moment, made even less happy when my husband commented, “You shouldn’t try to bake and listen to an audio book at the same time; I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it.”
The cake, most surprisingly, seemed okay. Even good. NO CLUE what happened.
I am glaring at your husband SO HARD right now.
Same. The urge to remove the cake from the oven and throw it into the trash in that moment would be nearly insurmountable, but H has a back-seat driving problem that I’ve been working on for 25 years so I might be overreacting …
I just made a cake and icing from scratch on Friday. That being said, I try to keep a couple of mixes in the house for specific cakes that call for the mix and then “dressed up.”
Usually, when I run across the pages long instructions, I generally re-type them into a condensed format – otherwise it gets too confusing.
I have to leave a plug for the Paprika Recipe Manager app; I think I paid $5 for it a few years ago and it has been absolutely worth it. If I find a recipe on my phone or iPad, I can just click the upload icon and it puts it right into my Paprika cookbook app like a normal, non-wordy recipe: a list of ingredients, the cooking directions, and no essay on The Many Smells of Grandmother’s Farm or whatever.
You can add notes, compile a shopping list from recipes, it’s really a great app.
Also love the paprika app!
Paprika has changed my life–well, the meal planning part of it. I love that I don’t need to retype a recipe, it can scale a recipe either direction, and lets me add my own edits and photos. And I’m no longer dependent on the recipe’s original website.
You know, if you don’t have softened butter, I know of a chocolate cake recipe that uses oil. It’s very moist — why, if it were any moister, it would be pudding.
Whacky, right?
My sister gave me a recipe for Six Minute Chocolate Cake from Moosewood Cooks at Home.
1.5 cups unbleached white flour
1/8 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1 cup cold water or brewed coffee
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 tsp vinegar
Preheat oven to 375.
Sift together flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt, and sugar into an UNGREASED 8-inch square or a 9-inch round baking pan.
In a 2-cup measuring cup, measure and mix together the water (or coffee), oil, and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients into the pan and mix the batter with a fork or small whisk.
When the batter is smooth, add vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls where the vinegar and baking soda react. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed.
Bake 25 – 30 minutes. Set aside.
My sister glazes it with a semi-sweet chocolate glaze, I just frost it with frosting from a can.
No eggs! Fantastic for those of us with egg-allergic kids! Also good for my vegan mother now that I look more closely!
It’s perfect for that! And it’s delicious.
My kid’s school is hosting a FAFSA info night tonight with a speaker from the local community college to tell us all about FAFSA. It seems kind of late to me for them to do this now but I haven’t started the FAFSA so … I guess it’s better now than a month from now or never.
I’ve been procrastinating on dealing the FAFSA because I don’t know what to expect and I hate going into things like that without some tiny idea of what I’m doing. Hopefully we get some good info tonight and that will unblock me and I can get this thing off the to-do list soon.
I don’t know what the Fs in FAFSA stand for, but I know what they should stand for. This kind of thing makes me crazy – I know it’s just a total UX fail, but it feels like there’s a particular demon in charge of developing stuff like this just to make everyone’s day a little shittier.
I’m so sorry about the car thing. We’re paying double tuitions this year (yes, you may pat my head and say ‘oh, you’re adorable’) and trying to keep our spending down and we keep running into expensive stuff that’s like ‘really, NOW?’