chocolate cake with the puddin’ an’ the coffee an’ the hippin’ an’ the hoppin’

now you will get ready for the zim-zam and the babbity-bippity, and you will take off your clothes like VOOO! and VOOOM! and get ready for the most splendiferous pudding cake you have ever eaten.

ingredients:

bottom:
¾ cup sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
½ cup soy milk
3 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla

top:
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup sugar
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 ½ cup coffee (or water, if you don’t like coffee)

preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

in a mixing bowl, stir together the dry ingredients from the “bottom” list (sugar, cocoa, flour, baking powder, salt).

use a liquid measuring cup to measure ½ cup of soy milk; add the oil and vanilla and stir.

combine wet and dry ingredients and stir thoroughly. taste-test the living hell out of it because this batter is sex for your mouth.

spread what remains of the batter into the bottom of an ungreased 8” or 9” square glass baking dish.

in a separate bowl, mix the dry topping ingredients together (brown sugar, sugar and cocoa powder), then spread the dry mixture evenly over the top of the batter. slowly pour the coffee (or water) on top so that it’s a big soupy thing--don’t mix it at all.

bake for about 40 minutes. you’ll know it’s done when you touch the top and it feels decently crusty and springs back at you. let it cool, and don’t even try to remove the contents from the pan en masse because the bottom layer is now a runny pudding. scoop pieces out with a large spoon instead.

i got fancy and made a three-berry purée (raspberry, marionberry and blueberry) to decorate the dish. i cut the solid part of the cake into a triangle and rested it in a pool of its own shame, then added sugared berries on top. dusting it with cocoa powder is another tasty idea.

this dessert is basically pure sugar. what i like, though, is that there isn’t awfully much fat, so unlike a lot of desserts that are high in both fat and sugar, you really only have to think about the sugar here. that simplifies things. i wouldn’t call it healthy by any means, but it’s not the worst.