Jill Can Cook: Mayonnaise Cake

I saw this cute little recipe box at my local Goodwill a month or two ago. It looks like the kind you sign up for and you're sent a couple of recipes a week until the box is filled up. My mom ordered stuff like this in the 1980's. Anyway, Goodwill was selling it for $5.00. Considering I can (and do) get tons of recipes for free on Pinterest, I thought $5.00 was a bit too much to spend on this.

Yeah, that's the price sticker on the front. And some extra cards that look like they don't belong! Score!

Over the course of the next several weeks, I'd check to see if the box was still there, which it was, and if it was half price, which it wasn't. Well, that is, until last week when I snagged it for $2.25 (half price, plus an additional 10% off! Woo hoo!)

I bought it while I was with my mom and afterwards, as I sipped the delicious coffee my mom made us post-shopping, I leafed through the cards in the box, every so often, showing my mom a good sounding or weird sounding recipe. And then I came to this one:



Hmmm.. This is an odd one...

I showed it to my mom, who quickly snatched it out of my hand.

 "Oh wow! I used to have this recipe. I remember making it and loving it," she exclaimed. Then she started digging through her cupboards, searching out all the ingredients to make it. Which she proceeded to do. When it was done, I had a sliver and really liked it! I actually couldn't wait to make it also!

Mayonnaise Cake

Ingredients:

I haven't been to Market Basket in a couple of weeks as you can tell!

• 2 cups ap flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 4 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1 cup boiling water
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

• Preheat oven 325 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9X( baking pan
• Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda and salt into large bowl
• Add mayonnaise to flour mixture and mix well. Add boiling water and vanilla extract and mix well.
• Pour into prepared baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.
• Finish with frosting or pawdered sugar or just keep plain! Enjoy!

 

Dry ingredients

Getting ready to add the Cains, which is my favorite Mayo!

 

After the Mayo was added. This mixture smelled a little funky, but I was kind of into it.

The extremely soupy batter getting ready to go in the oven.

This is what will house my cake when I'm done.

I'm taking a break from the recipe/baking so I can send a special shout-out to Joe's grandmother for hooking me up with some fantastic baking accessories over the last couple of Christmases. I got this from her a year ago.

It's a really cool cake displayer/chips and salsa  holder/trifle type thing. I love that it has a few different functions. It's going to get a lot of use.. except...

Except, I am now afraid to make cakes because this happened when I took the cake out of the oven:

Not cool, Mayo Cake!!

And the rest of the cake is right here:

Dang... I really suck at this!

Well, that was a complete bust!! The cake was WAY too delicate. It just would not stay together. Once it was out of the pan, it just flattened and whole sections fell off. I went through every scenario in which I could've screwed up. The biggies were:

• Wrong type of pan
• Not enough grease/flour in pan
• Over cooked
• Under cooked
• Released from pan too soon
• Messed up one or more ingredients
• Wrong type of Mayo
• Should've cooled water before adding
• Aliens came and switched my perfect cake out for this awful cake due to jealousy of my awesome baking skills

After much researching on Pinterest, scouring all the other Mayonnaise Cake recipes (like 5 recipes. I got bored after a few minutes), I think I might've found out what my problem is, which is mostly just a guess considering there were a lot of differences in the recipes I found.

1.  4 out of the 5 recipes did not use boiling water. They either used room temp or hot. Boiling = bad.
2. Most of the recipes I found used 1/4- 1/2 cocoa powder. That's leaps and bounds more than what I used. I don't think this affected the issue of my cake being too crumbly, but it would definitely affect the flavor.
3. A lot of the other recipes called for a couple of eggs, too. Maybe the cake would hold up better with more eggs?

I'm in no rush to put my guesses as to how to fix this to use. We don't eat cake very often. Someday I will make it again, though, and I'll let you guys know if I screw it up again.

Oh, and by the way, once I "frosted" the cake, it looked a whole lot better. I put the word frost in quotes because the cake was completely falling apart and could not be frosted, so I heated up my frosting until it was liquidy enough to drizzle on the top.

It doesn't look too bad from this angle.

But there's a huge crack on this side.

And this whole area is just barely hanging on!

It looks the best when the cover is on.

Ohhh... I forgot to mention, when my mom made hers, it came out more stable than mine. It wasn't extremely chocolatey and from what I remember, hers was really soft and thin, too, although, it wasn't a dense cake. I chalk this up to the fact that maybe my stove heated my water hotter than hers, or maybe hers seemed less crumbly because she didn't sift her flour first. Not sure. But I really do think it's something wrong with the recipe and not Aliens, like I originally thought.