Happy Birthday to ME!!

    Today, June 13th is my birthday.. and I just want to thank you, my friends for being so loving and kind.  I plan to be happy, have "fun", act crazy, bug everyone..especially Doug and Diane and eat cake.. chocolate ...indubitably
so I believe our next installent from June (of Doug and June), will be  Wellesley Fudge Cake...or how to stay fat all through college.

      Wellesley is a town in Massachusetts that is home to a  woman's college that is very LA DI DAH.  The alumnae include Hillary Rodman Clinton, Nora Ephram, Judith Martin (better known as Miss Manners), Cokie Roberts, Diane Sawyer, Madeleine Korbel Albright, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, you know slackers like that.  Ahhh what i could have been if I had attended Wellesley College...I might have even had a food blog!! (wait I do..nevermind).

      Wellesley Fudge Cake, goes back to the late 1800’s. Two Wellesley College graduates found a recipe for fudge cake in a Boston newspaper and started making it for the Wellesley Tea Room. (How I wish I had a tea room..sigh). The cake has been famous ever since. This recipes uses Baker’s chocolate (originally in Dorchester, Ma) which has been around for over 100 years. This is not my personal recipe in as much as I did not invent it..but it is mine in as much as I have eaten it sensuously and decadently!

Wellesley Fudge Cake

Market List:

For the cake:

4 baker's unsweetened chocolate squares (baker's chocolate)

1/2 cup water

1 3/4 cups sugar

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter (yes, butter..not margaine)

3 eggs (yes eggs, not eggbeaters)

3/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla (real vanilla, please)

For the frosting:
4 baker's unsweetened chocolate square
2 tablespoons butter

1 lb confectioners' sugar (sometimes called icing or powdered sugar, 4 cups) 1 dash salt

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

(the frosting is also good on cookies, brownies, spoons, various and sundry body parts..make a double batch..you never know when you will get lucky)

Directions

FOR THE FUDGE CAKE:

Melt chocolate in water in saucepan over very low heat, stirring constantly until smooth. Add 1/2 cup of the sugar; cook and stir 2 minutes longer. Cool.

Mix flour, soda and salt in a bowl.

Cream butter. Gradually beat in remaining 1 1/4 cups sugar and continue beating until light and fluffy.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each. Alternately add flour mixture and milk, beating after each addition until smooth. Blend in vanilla and melted chocolate mixture. (important stuff..pay attention)

Pour into 2 greased and floured 9-inch layer pans. Bake at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes, or until cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean. (and if you are me, use a clean blade of a butter knife for a cake tester works as well)  Cool in pans 10 minutes. Remove from pans and finish cooling on racks.

FOR THE FUDGE FROSTING:

 

Melt chocolate with butter over very low heat, stirring constantly until smooth. Remove from heat.

Combine sugar, salt, milk and vanilla.

 Add chocolate, blending well. If necessary, let stand until of spreading consistency, stirring occasionally.

Spread quickly, adding a small amount of additional milk if frosting thickens (or just eat it with a spoon).

Makes about 2 1/2 cups, or enough to cover tops and sides of two 8 or 9 inch layers, the top and sides of one 9-inch square or 13 x 9 inch cake, or the tops of 24 cupcakes. (and some naughty bits also)

Spread frosting between layers and over top and sides of cake or anything else you wish. Garnish with chopped nuts (insert crude nut comments here), if desired.

The History Of Wellesley Fudge Cake (more information than anyone wants about a cake):

Wellesley Fudge cake--a deeply decadent chocolate cake topped with a slab of fudge frosting--seems an unlikely sweet to associate with the prim-and-proper ladies of Wellesley (the college featured in the classic feat of cinema Mona Lisa Smile). {yeah that's what wellesley is know for a movie..not the hundreds of bright, successful women that studied there}

Clearly by the popularity of this recipe, it seems that those young ladies had as voracious an appetite for the sweet stuff as they did for knowledge.(Perhaps they didn't know the correalation between sex and chocolate...no Doug..not bacon..chocolate!) But to really look at the origins of this cake we’ve got to rewind a little bit, to the invention of fudge itself.(how boring..yawn)

  Fudge, that semi-soft candy made from butter, sugar, and various flavorings (very commonly chocolate) is an american-ized version of french bonbons and creams, and it became popular in the US in the early 1900s.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the name is perhaps derived from the word “fadge”, which is an old-timey term for “to fit pieces together”. Of course, not to confuse you, but an Irish dish called “Fadge” does exist, but it is actually an apple potato cake, traditionally served at Halloween.(completely usless and irrevelant onformation)

As an interesting side note, the word “fudge” referring to a cheat or hoax dates to the 1830s, before the candy was popular--but this may explain how the name was assigned to the candy, too. (seriously now???) You see, those young college ladies would use the sweet stuff as their excuse to stay up late: candy-making was an acceptable activity, they would stay up late, ostensibly to talk about boys (aka SEX) and other forbidden subjects (Money, independence, power and fame.) “Nearly every night at college,” said the Vassar girl, “some girl may be found somewhere who is making ‘fudges’ or giving a fudge party.” The timing seems to work out: the word “fudge” for a confection showed up as early as the 1890s, and by 1908 the term was commonly used in association with women’s colleges.

A 1909 cookbook produced by Walter Baker & Co. (producer of Baker’s chocolates) includes three different recipes for fudge, each just slightly different and named, respectively, after Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley colleges.

In fact, there is a letter in the Vassar archives which says,

“Fudge, as I first knew it, was first made in Baltimore by a cousin of a schoolmate of mine. It was sold in 1886 in a grocery store...I secured a recipe and in my first year at Vassar, I made it there--and in 1888 I made 30 pounds for the Senior auction, its real introduction to the college, I think.” (who cares who invented fudge..I could say I did!!)

So why would it proliferate, and be adapted to an even richer and more over the top treat, the decadent Wellesley Fudge Cake, at this particular school (all women and no sex!)? Perhaps because it was such a forbidden pleasure there. An 1876 circular to parents states that the college refuses to accept students who are broken down in health, maintaining that a proper diet is key for proper learning, and that “we have therefore decided not to receive any one who will not come with the resolution to obey cheerfully all our rules in this respect, and pledged in honor neither to buy nor receive in any manner whatsoever any confectionery or eatables of any kind not provided for them by the College.” Further, the founder of Wellesley College held that, “pies, lies, and doughnuts should never have a place in Wellesley College” (Yes lips that eat doughnuts shall never touch mine..unless he is really cute). Well, naturally it would take off here: it tasted positively sacre-licious!