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Texas Sheet Cake

From

February/March 2008

Texas Sheet Cake

Texas Sheet Cake is a huge, pecan-topped cake with three distinct layers of chocolaty goodness. We poured sweet chocolate icing over a cake hot out of the oven. When it cooled, we had an icing layer, a fudgy layer where the icing and hot cake had mixed together, and a bottom layer of moist cake. Most existing Texas sheet cake recipes called for a scant amount of cocoa powder, which makes for measly chocolate taste. We wanted our Texas Sheet Cake recipe to pack in even more chocolate flavor. Doubling the amount of cocoa helped, but melted semisweet chocolate gave our Texas Sheet Cake recipe strong chocolate flavor—and added moisture and fat to the batter, which made for a fudgier cake. Replacing milk with heavy cream gave the icing more body, while adding corn syrup produced frosting with a lustrous finish. The key to creating the signature fudgy layer between cake and icing was to let the warm icing soak into the hot cake. So we poured the icing as soon as the Texas sheet cake came out of the oven, using a spatula to spread it.

Serves 24

Toast the pecans in a dry skillet over medium heat, shaking the pan occasionally, until golden and fragrant, about 5 minutes.

Ingredients

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