Chocolate Sheet Cake

This is a cake I have never heard of and was the winning suggestion of Tracie after I posed the question of what to make on my facebook page. I also loved the site it came from; we don't have anything like that (that I know of) in Australia.

I learned a couple of things on this adventure, being a what a stick of butter is, and also to watch my measurements (one near disaster averted, read on). Butter is not sold as a stick in Australia so for those who need to know it, a stick of butter is approximately 115grams of butter.

If you compare my ingredients on the left to the site the recipe came from you'll notice a couple of things; pretzels and sultanas?!? The recipe calls for pecans but I thought I'd try and use up some of our sultanas and and as for the pretzels, well sometimes chocolate and salt go well together (plus I felt like eating some pretzels on the walk home from the shops).

This is an easy cake to make. You basically melt the butter and cocoa powder together and add some boiling water - it smells and looks delicious even at this point, not very tasty though (yes, I tried a bit).

You then add the cocoa mix to the flour and sugar (I use raw sugar when cooking) and give it a mix. In a measuring cup I mixed the buttermilk, eggs, vanilla essence and baking soda. This is where I averted a near disaster that would have seen my sheet cake be more of a mattress cake as I put one tablespoon of baking soda instead of one teaspoon. Down the sink it went and I started that little bit over again.

Once I was certain I hadn't stuffed up a second time I added the eggy mix into the chocolaty flour mix and gave it a burl on a low speed to blend it all together. I then poured the final mixture into a shallow tin (I guess this is where the name "sheet" comes from) lined with baking paper (so I could literally lift them out once done, at least that worked).

At this stage I licked the Kitchen Aid beater clean and got onto making the icing whilst the cakes cooked.

To make the icing, you once again melt the butter and cocoa (minus the taste test, been there done that), then add a little icing sugar (as we call it in Australia), milk and vanilla essence. I crushed up some pretzels with the base of a measuring cup ready to use in some of the icing mixture.

The chocolate aroma in the house also only intensified at the cakes cooked and the icing was in production - this was a good choice of baking - I was in the mood for chocolate.

When the cakes cooled a little I put sultanas on one of them and then poured the warm icing over. I didn't mix the sultanas into the icing first as I simply didn't want to mess up another bowl (I just wanted to use the one pot to make the icing and added the pretzels to the pot once I had finished pouring the icing over the sultana'd cake).

Did my ideas of sultanas and pretzels work - yes and no. The sultana version had a sweet taste to it but it was more of a natural sweetness than white sugar - it was also chewier. The pretzels however did not remain cruchy so I think I should have sprinkled them on top instead - the salt was not as evident as I had hoped for either - but it was still totally enjoyable! Next time I think I should stick to using chopped pecans though.

Category	Chocolate Sheet Cake
Ease of preparation	Easy
Time from prep to table	60 minutes
Taste	Chocolaty
Visual appeal	Like all cakes - very good
Radicality (i.e variation from my normal cuisine) out of 5	4
Recipe enhancement tips	Even more awesome served with vanilla icecream
Final assessment	Easy peasy, will make again.