Dirt Cake

On certain very special occasions, my pal Sharlene (yes, the glamourpuss who got the original red velvet cake, below) will whip up her mother Mavis's famous Dirt Cake. It's trompe l'oeil, central-Illinois style: You fill a flowerpot with layers of chocolate cake and chocolate pudding, top it with chocolate icing and then add a thick layer of crumbled chocolate-cake crumbs. Then you poke flowers into the "dirt"--either real ones or, if you're really gifted, fake ones made out of marzipan or fondant. It should look as realistic as possible, in order to make your guests really freak out when you stick your fingers into the pot and start happily licking the "dirt" off your hands.

Why Dirt Cake? Well, I was at the Union Square Greenmarket yesterday, and there was a book-signing going on for a great new book called
You Grow Girl, written by nifty Canadian Gayla Trail. 5 years ago, Trail started a website by the same name--a kind of virtual gardening club for funky urban homemakers. Now, the many tips, tricks, and helpful hints she's learned over the years are collected in a delightful, very user-friendly book. Whether you've got an overgrown backyard or just a teeny fire escape, this book will make you want to get out there and get dirty. Click on the link, over on the right, to get more info and find like-minded grow girls in your neighborhood.

Right now, I fall into the teeny (and mostly) shady fire-escape camp, so I'm doing more baking than gardening. But if I don't have dirt, I do have chocolate, so I spent Saturday afternoon whipping up a batch of devil's food cupcakes (from a recipe in a recent issue of Cooks Illustrated) to take to a little backyard get-together in Park Slope.

Do you know this magazine? The obsessive recipe testers at CI are the copy editors of the food world, fending off the sloppy, dump-and-taste barbarians with single-minded scientific devotion. An article about something completely ordinary, like mac and cheese or roast chicken, always starts with a line like "To find out the truly best way to roast a chicken, we spent three months roasting over 500 chickens in our test kitchen." And then they'll tell you, in insanely nit-picky detail, how they explored each tiny variable, probably in between scrubbing every strip of grout on their bathroom tile with a toothbrush and re-alphabetizing the spice rack.

Well, modern medication is a wonderful thing. I hadn't really thought that cupcakes needed their own recipe--isn't it enough just to slop a regular cake batter into a muffin pan?--but clearly, the cupcake question had been keeping the Ritalin-fired CI staff up nights. And the recipe's pretty damn good, as it should be with chocolate, cocoa, butter AND sour cream in there.

If you want the dirt-cake look, you can crumble up one of the cupcakes and sprinkle the crumbs over the icing, adding edible or sugar flowers on top.

Sweet Little Cupcakes, Baked by the Devil
aka Devil's Food Cupcakes

1 stick butter (4 oz)
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I like Droste)
2 oz. bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate (i.e., stuff you'd eat by itself, not unsweetened baking chocolate)
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract or strong coffee
3/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sour cream (4 oz, or half a small-size carton) or plain yogurt, or buttermilk

In a double boiler (or a metal bowl set over a pot of simmering water), melt the chocolate, butter, and cocoa together. When everything's melted, stir until smooth, then remove the bowl and let it cool until the chocolate mixture is just barely warm.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 and line a 12-cup muffin pan with those cute little paper liners. Then beat the eggs, sugar, and vanilla together in a big bowl, and sift or whisk together the dry ingredients in a smaller bowl. When the chocolate's cooled off, scrape it all out with the rubber spatula into the eggs and beat together. Add about half the flour mix, stir, add sour cream, stir, then add rest of the flour and mix gently again. Scoop your lovely, gloopy dark-choc batter evenly into the muffin cups. Bake 20 minutes, or just until a cake tester comes out clean from the center of the cupcakes. Don't overbake! Let cool on a rack, and don't ice until they are perfectly room-temp.

Quickie chocolate icing

1/2 stick butter, really soft
4 TB unsweetened cocoa
1 TB coffee, rum, vanilla--whatever you like
1 cup powdered sugar

Beat soft butter with cocoa, then add the coffee, rum or whatever. Beat in sugar--if it looks too dry or clumpy, add some more coffee or a little warm water. Beat until fluffy. At first taste, it might seem way too sweet, but it will mellow after an hour or so, so don't start doctoring it until you've let it sit around for a while. Makes enough to lavishly ice a dozen cupcakes.

Songs for Dirt Cake

1. Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, "These Foolish Things"
2. Brooke Benton and Dinah Washington, "You've Got What It Takes"
3. Bow Wow Wow, "I Want Candy"
4. Romeo Nelson, "Gettin' Dirty (Just Shakin' That Thing)
5. the theme song from Brooklyn cable-access cooking show Post-Punk Kitchen