Chocolate Party Layer Cake adds a festive presence to any party. The quick-mix cocoa batter takes 4 minutes of beating with an electric mixer and the cocoa cream frosting is ready in half that time.
I created this cake forty years ago when I began my career as host of a 30-minute cooking show, "Big Sky Cooking," in Montana. For my first show, I prepared two chocolate cakes. The first was an old recipe known as "Crazy cake" or "Wacky Cake," a cake made by whisking together flour, cocoa, sugar, baking soda, vinegar, water, vanilla, and salad oil, in a bowl and baked in a square pan. The second cake I put together was this quick-mix recipe for Chocolate Party Layer Cake, a showstopper that make my kids and all their friends very happy. Me, too! Quick-mix cakes, where all the batter ingredients get beaten together at once, gained their fame in the 1950s, when more and more women began having full-time jobs.
Vegetable shortening was the key ingredient because its soft and creamy texture blended quickly into the batter. And these cakes had the same lightness of texture as their creaming-the-butter-and-sugar cousins. Vegetable shortening is tasteless, however, so I shun this quick fix method for white or yellow cakes. But chocolate cakes made this way have enough strong flavor to overcome the neutrality of vegetable shortening. Much to my joy, I find this recipe still works. Why might it not? Flour milling and flour combinations used to make all-purpose flour can change over time, and if that happens it can create all sorts of baking problems. Fortunately, any such changes that may have occurred across the decades have not changed the quality of this cake. Give it a try. I think you'll be quite happy.