BY EMMA NAILLE (’18)

I have baked whoopie pies, peanut butter cup cookies and mini cheesecakes but this time, I decided to take my baking expertise to the next level and learn how to bake something I had never heard of. I follow a couple of baking blogs on my personal instagram, and the pictures always make me want to try their recipes and take artsy pictures. So I looked up The Vanilla Bean Blog and looked at her recipes to see which one I wanted to try. With the help of my family (who would be helping me eat what I baked) I settled on “Izy’s Swedish Chocolate Cake.” This cake is called kladdkaka in swedish and is a dense chocolate cake with a gooey center. It is also, appropriately, known as a chocolate mud cake.

I was surprised to find that the recipe for this cake is actually a pretty simple, though this is not your average chocolate cake. I wanted to try to make a video of the recipe, Buzzfeed Tasty style, and had my phone all set up to do so. Carley, my sister, was in charge of hitting record. But alas, she did not hit record and I made the entire batter without recording it. All I got was this shot of us melting butter in a pan.

The recipe says to melt the butter in a medium saucepan and then mix in all the other ingredients, which makes it sound like you are supposed to make the whole batter in the saucepan, but we moved the butter to a glass bowl and mixed in the other ingredients to that. The butter did look like it had solidified a bit when I mixed the batter together because there were some chunks of butter, which is probably why the recipe says to keep it in the pan. All in all, this cake was very easy to make. You basically just mix all the ingredients together and then pour it into the pan and let it bake.

The most difficult part is determining when to take it out of the oven. The recipe gives quite a large range (20-30 minutes) for how long to bake the cake, and usually there is only about a five minute range. The recipe says the edges are supposed to be “set,” which basically just means baked like a regular cake, and the middle is supposed to be gooey, but a little bit thicker than the center of a lava cake. I decided to put the cake in for 23 minutes to start. I ended up baking it for a total of about 25 minutes.

Once I took it out, I realized I probably should have let it bake a little bit longer because when I tried to take it out of the pan, after letting it cool for 20 minutes, it kind of fell apart. I just scooped it back into the pan and put some powdered sugar on top to cover up the cracks (pro tip for covering up your mistakes).

I let the cake cool for a little bit longer (back in the pan) and then decided to taste it. This cake truly fulfilled all of my rich, melty, and gooey chocolate dreams. It is basically a cross between a big brownie and a lava cake. This cake is absolutely scrumptious, it’s kind of cake you have to just take a fork to and eat straight from the pan, which is exactly what my family has been doing for the past few days.