A present? For me!?!

Hello again! Glad to see you've come back. After yester-evening's post, I received a belated graduation gift from G and L. What was it you might ask? Something I've been wanting for some time, but was too poor (college student, just graduated) to justify spending money on, as it is somewhat pricey. My lovely friends bought me... wait for it... Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," volumes one AND two. LUCKY ME!!

This is me, by the way (with my glorious new cookbooks) (in my apartment's tiny, crappy kitchen), in case you were wanting to put a face with my name:

Yes, I'm an adult with braces, and I look very, very young. Worse still, however, is how difficult they make some of my favorite foods. People, get your kids braces when they're young. It'll save loads of trouble later, when their palettes are more developed and they resent not being able to eat certain delicious foods...

ANYWAY, I digress. Today's topic: chocolate cake. A few weeks ago, L and I had a girl's night out, and ate at P.F. Chang's (a chinese chain restaurant, in case you've never heard of it). This, my friends, is the Great Wall of Chocolate:

Ever since consuming said Great Wall, I've been trying to re-create a chocolate cake that's just as good. To do so, I've utilized the following Books: Crazy for Chocolate and The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Chocolate. Both books are good for their own reasons- Crazy for Chocolate is inexpensive (I found it in the bargain section of Borders for three dollars), and has LOTS of pictures, along with many good ideas for garnishes. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Chcolate includes an in-depth examination of different types of chocolate, the history of chocolate, and explains how to use the different types in different situations. Having said that, cake attempts one and two, while both very aesthetically pleasing, were dense, somewhat dry, and not nearly dark enough to compare to the Great Wall. I'm not blaming it on the books- I'm working at a high altitude and didn't have the right size pans, so I scaled the recipes up to try to fill bigger pans. Not ideal.

Then I thought to myself, "Wow, self, you're an IDIOT!" Here's why. My husband's Grandmother was an AMAZING cook. She kept a giant binder of recipes while she was alive, and had always wanted to turn it into a real cookbook and get it published. After she died, the family did just that using a great website called FamilyCookbookProject.com. Now everyone has a copy of all of her great recipes in "The Merkley Family Cookbook" (If you'd like to purchase a copy, leave a comment).

Anyway, Grandma Merkley has what she calls "My Own Devil's Food Cake Recipe," meaning, I presume, that she invented it. I tried it once a few years ago, but her instructions for mixing are VERY vague. I mean, she really doesn't tell you what to do with the ingredients, so it failed miserably. The texture was awful, because I didn't know what order to put things together in. So today I decided that since it's been a few years and several cakes ago that I last tried this thing, that I would bust out the big guns and give it a try. Because honestly, who bakes better than Grandma?? Using her cake recipe, and Julia's Icing recipe, this is what I've come up with:

We haven't eaten it yet- we're having some friends over for dinner later and this will be dessert. I'm going to make a berry sauce to serve it with- wish me luck! You'll have to come back another day to see how it turned out...