The Coca-Cola Cake comes in a wide variety of forms. It appears to have originated in 1952 in the Charleson Gazette in an “unusual dishes” contest. It bounced around the South and Southern cookbooks for the next 45 years, but it wouldn’t really hit it big until 1997. That’s when the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain introduced the Double Chocolate Fudge Coca-Cola Cake as a limited time item. It would come by popular demand from time-to-time (apparently, it’s the Cracker Barrel version of the McRib) until it finally joined the permanent menu in 2009.
There are versions with marshmallows. With nuts. Made in a cake pan. Made in a casserole dish. But they all share Coca-Cola Classic as an ingredient in both the cake and the icing.
There are other soda cakes (particularly ones with root beer or 7-Up) that have Southern roots, so this won’t be the last carbonated cake I make, but I’ve had no experience with them before now.
I didn’t make this cake until Wednesday. And I don’t know what I was thinking. Because I was exhausted.
Everyday at work had gone beyond its allotted 8 hours and they were packed wall-to-wall with stuff to do. I had a paper due in my policy class and lots of reading in my democratic backsliding course. It’s a new fiscal year at work, so I’m trying to get old reimbursements processed and trying to make that everything gets approved in a timely fashion. I had two sessions of the class I’m teaching and 21 separate meetings I had to attend. But I hadn’t made a cake yet, and my fool self was like “but what about the project? A cake every week for a year? You’re already going to miss the last week of July because you’re going to be in Massachusetts…two fails in one month would be bad for momentum.”
Like other people actually care if this project misses a week (however, I did have an employee say to me last Monday that when he walked in and there was no cake on the counter, he thought maybe I was working at home for the day). So I decided to make a Coca-Cola Cake as an easy weeknight recipe.
I used Southern Living’s recipe. It called for 1 cup of Coca Cola in the Cake and 4 cups of Coca Cola for the frosting. And it should have been easy. It’s a two layer chocolate cake with a flavored buttercream. I should be able to do this in my sleep.
But I was tired.
See, the flavor in the buttercream from all that Coke? The recipe calls for boiling it down into a syrup (4 cups to yield 1/3 cup syrup) over the course of an hour while the cake is baking. Which is fine. Except I did the thing you should never do: I trusted the timing in a recipe instead of my own wits and knowledge.
It said 70 minutes. When I came in at 55 minutes (10 minutes after the last check), it had turned into a roiling, bubbling, slightly scorched smelling mess. We had passed syrup territory. We were now in the land of caramel. And the caramel would not due. Because as it soon as it stopped being boiling lava hot, it became hard as a rock on the bottom of the pan.
For a while, I tried to reconstitute it. Adding more water while it was over heat to see if I could reboil down to a sugar (like with a sugar-based caramel), but it was a lost cause. Luckily, though, because it was just sugar, leaving the pan to soak in hot soapy water got rid of all the charred on crap. So I started again. At 8pm. To make a syrup. And this time, I watched YouTube on my phone while stirring caramel and checking the volume every five minutes. I got my 1/3 cup of syrup, chilled it in the freezer while I took a shower, and added it to my buttercream. Apply the buttercream, create swirls with the back of a spoon.
And what did I get for all that effort?
A really pretty, faintly caramel-colored chocolate cake. A good chocolate cake. A well-made chocolate cake. But, truthfully, at the end of the day, nothing all that special. To paraphrase Prue Leith, it wasn’t worth the effort. But Dale said it’s the prettiest cake I’ve made in this project so far, and it got some compliments from some colleagues, so I’ll take it.
