High Hopes Chocolate Cake

Hooray! It's the first (actual) entry into the Combat Baking portion of my blog. The other entry was actually an explanation of this portion. I finally got to bake something, and believe me, it was long overdue. The first baked goodie for this deployment? Something I have aptly dubbed "High Hopes Chocolate Cake" both for the fact that I had to make so many substitutions on a regular recipe and that I baked the final result in an airplane high over Afghanistan. (How freaking cool is that?)


Honestly, I wanted my first baked endeavor for this to be Banana bread. I even saved some bananas I got from the D-fac one morning during a breakfast-run in the freezer with the plan to make banana bread once my baking care package arrived. When it finally did, and I went to claim my bananas, someone had thrown them away. I wouldn't be so annoyed if it weren't for the fact that bananas are incredibly hard to come by out here. I didn't realize it until I tried finding them, but they are practically nowhere. Sadly, there really isn't a substitution for bananas in BANANA bread.

Anyway this entry is about chocolate cake and here I have whipped up a crude version. Sure, it's not pretty, but neither is war.


Ingredients:
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour (sent by hubby in care package)
1/2 c. sugar (also sent by hubby)
1/2 c. hot cocoa mix (stolen from someone else's left overs from a care package)
1 tsp. baking powder (care package from hubby)
1/2 tsp. baking soda (care package, again)
3 packets of mayonnaise (stolen from the Dining Facility)
1/2 c. apple sauce (care package - but can also be acquired from D-Fac)
3 tbsp. yogurt (Or "yoghurt" as the D-Fac so dubbed it)
1 c. chocolate shavings (from the D-Fac ice cream bar)
2-4 tbsp. water

Mix flour, sugar, hot cocoa mix, baking powder and baking soda together in bowl. (Ideally, you would have more than one bowl, but I only have this one tiny one so I have to mix it as well as I can with a whisk and a plastic spoon. Man, do I miss my Kitchenaid mixer already!)  

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in mayonnaise, apple sauce and yog(h)urt. Do your best to stir it and completely incorporate the ingredients. If needed, add water to thin batter out. (It really should be more like the consistency of pudding.)

Stir in chocolate shavings.

Baking dish I created

Scoop into baking dish. (I have a bread pan but for this cake, I wanted to kind of make easier-to-eat servings for the crew so I created little baking pans of my own. I took soup bowls and lined them with foil - with the help of my friend Julie - and then scooped the batter into them. I was able to get four servings this way.)  

Filled with chocolaty goop

My original, unaltered recipe called for baking this at 375 degrees for approx 9-11 minutes. That was for minicakes. That temperature would be good for baking a regular cake as well although you would have to increase the time, obviously. I didn't actually bake these, another (less busy) crew member did the baking part but I think he did well. The cake turned out delicious.


I actually made this batter in an afternoon which we were supposed to be flying. Unfortunately, our flight never went and I was stuck with 4 un-baked cakes. I didn't want to give up and I was eager to find out how the batter would taste baked. In my desperation, I threw two of the 4 cakes into the maintenance crew's toaster oven for 20 minutes. (It would have been longer but our bus showed up and I had to leave.)  I grabbed my cakes, fresh out of the toaster oven and ran to the bus with forks. Much to my dismay, the cake wasn't even close to being cooked. I stuck the other 2 batters in the fridge at the hanger with high hopes that we would fly the next night so I could properly bake them in an actual oven. :)

Baking is a challenge. Baking in a combat zone is a vivication.