For every birthday, I made a special request to have a Mud Cake. What is a Mud Cake? The more proper name is “Chocolate Pudding Cake” but my grandmother made it when my cousins and I were little, and the name stuck.
It is a very simple recipe, involving a standard cake mix and a box of cooking pudding. I decided that I was going to make it to impress my boyfriend. He is my husband now, so apparently I did not poison him. I certainly came close that night.
I called Grandma up to proudly tell her what I was doing. I bought the cake mix and the pudding, and followed the package to a “T”. I had my egg and flour out, made the cake mix and then stirred in a box of the pudding.
As it was cooking, I noticed something didn’t look quite right, but I chalked that up to performance anxiety. When I brought it out to cook, I noticed that one side of the cake was only about a centimeter high, where the other edge almost was as tall as the lip of the pan.
My boyfriend came over, and tasted the cake.
“What is this supposed to be? A brownie?,” he said.
“No. It is supposed to be Chocolate Pudding Cake. The one that my Grandma makes.”
Inspired by his looks of incredulity and a cake texture that the NHL would be begging me to reveal to them to use to make practice pucks, I called Grandma up.
Then she laid it on me:
I was supposed to MAKE THE PUDDING. When it was thoroughly stirred, I was to stir in one chocolate cake mix. Then, instead of putting it in the fridge to set up, I was supposed to pour it into a cake pan and back it.
Can dyslexia translate beyond the written page and cause one to confuse left and right and get spoken directions backwards too?
Mud Cake aka Chocolate Pudding Cake
The REAL Recipe
1 Commercial chocolate cake mix
1 4 oz Packet of chocolate pudding. Must be the baking kind, plus the milk or water it calls for.
Follow directions on pudding package. When ingredients are mixed thoroughly, open and add the full cake mix.Follow temperature suggestions recommended for the cake mix, making sure to check the cake often to adjust for your oven and elevation. Test with toothpicks. When they come out clean, the cake is done.
This is a SUPER MOIST cake. If you plan to serve the cake on a different date from when you serve it, you must lightly dust the top with baking powder. Okay, if you make it the night before and take it to a party the next morning, we will count that as the same day. We are not talking actual calendar days, but common sense. This is especially crucial if you plan to store the leftover cake in plastic. The cake may get moldy very quickly because of the moisture content if you do not.
And I am still strongly discouraged from baking til this very day. I think I should keep an open mind as I could have done better if I promoted them as the world’s most compact and harshest tasting brownies. One could say that I achieved that.
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