Wellesley Fudge Cake

Roughly a century ago, the founder of Wellesley College held that, “pies, lies, and doughnuts should never have a place in Wellesley college.” Students honed their fudge-making skills in secret. We wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• It seems decades of chocolate overload have desensitized the modern palate, and far more chocolate flavor was required of our cake. We substituted some of the bar chocolate for cocoa powder bloomed in hot water to deepen its flavor.
• Our thick, fudgy frosting required an extra-sturdy cake to support it. Pastry flour in place of all-purpose flour gave the cake more stability.
• Traditional recipes called for “thick sour milk,” an ingredient we weren’t quite prepared to call for. Instead, we used buttermilk to give our cake a hint of tang.
• Our filling recipe needed to be simple, so we immediately scrapped anything that required a candy thermometer. We found an unexpected solution that called for evaporated milk.
• Our frosting kept falling apart when we added chocolate to the warm sugar mixture. The heat was causing the fat in the chocolate to separate, a problem easily solved by adding butter and evaporated milk first to cool it down a bit.