Those that know me know that chocolate is very near and dear to my heart. They also know that baked goods are a vice of mine and if you ask me, I cannot live without them. Now, that doesn't mean I eat them every day all day, but I usually can't go more than 2 weeks without some sort of baked treat, usually with chocolate in it. Well, it's been at least 2 weeks since I had any really good baked treats and I have been craving chocolate badly. It would seem this would be a simple thing to fix. I have all the ingredients to make myself something and I had some time the past couple of days to so. The problem? The glass on my oven door exploded into a million pieces about 4 weeks ago and I don't have the money to fix it right now. No problem, I have other ways to cook things, or so I thought. When my oven door broke, I started looking up ways to cook without an oven. I found oodles of yummy looking recipes for toaster ovens and crockpots and thought, "Surely I can make this work. "
For the past few weeks I have used both my crockpot and my toaster oven to make a few things, albeit they were very simple things, and so far it's worked great. Enter my craving for chocolate baked goodies this weekend, and that's when the trouble started. I thought I would just make cupcakes in my toaster oven, but I didn't have any pans small enough to fit in it (it's a small cheap one). Then I remembered I had seen several recipes for crockpot chocolate cake. Everyone kept saying how easy it was and how wonderful the cake had turned out. This sounded like the answer to my predicament. So, last night I gathered all the ingredients for my cake and set to work mixing and putting the batter on to bake.
Now we hit the disaster part of the story. None of the recipes said that I had to leave the lid on my crockpot in order for the cake to cook faster. I had left the lid off because it still smelled of my last crockpot dish, an italian sausage cabbage stew. I don't know about you, but I'm not really a fan of cabbage and chocolate together and I didn't want my cake to taste like cabbabe stew. So, I left the lid off and figured it wouldn't really matter all that much. I was wrong. After 3.5 hours of cooking on 'high', the cake was still a puddle of chocolatey goo. Hmm, perhaps I should have put the lid on. I found a plate that would fit over the top of my crockpot and used it as a lid. After another hour and a half the cake was pretty much done, but it still had some wet spots. By this time it was 11:30 and I was exhausted. I figured I could unplug the crockpot but leave the lid on and the cake would finish cooking without burning.
When I woke up this morning I went to check on my cake experiment. The cake was done baking but it was extremely tough to cut. I managed to saw a piece out and could tell right away that it was very dense and not quite right. Overall, it tasted like a very heavy cake brownie that was chalky on the outer edge but almost gooey in the middle. The middle part wasn't so bad, but the other two thirds you would have to eat through to get to it was terrible. *Sigh* I had ruined my cake. I guess maybe it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Pros - I learned something new. Cons - I still have not satisfied my craving for chocolate baked goods.
I have no idea what specific thing I did wrong that made my cake such a disaster, but I'm guessing it probably isn't one specific thing and rather a myriad of things. Perhaps it was the fact that I made the cake from scratch instead of using a box mix, as so many of the recipes suggested. Perhaps it's that I used sifted flour for breads rather than the all-purpose flour the recipe called for. Perhaps it's because I combined two recipes in order to use what was in my pantry rather than have to go to the store to buy something. Perhaps it was the lid fiasco. Perhaps it was the overnight baking. See what I mean? There are way too many possibilites to choose from. Oh well. At least I know where to start next time, if I can find the courage to try a next time.
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