Chiriquí Chatter

With guests coming for the holiday weekend, I decided to try a new cake recipe. I can’t remember how I found this recipe, but I think I had done a google search for chocolate cake with nuts recipes.

I found one called Earthquake Cake. I had never heard of a cake with this name before, but I must be one of the few that hadn’t. I just went to Cooks.com and did a search for the recipe again. It came up with 193 recipes. If one web location has that many recipes for the same cake, it must be pretty popular. I wonder why I had never heard of it.

I would have taken a picture of the cake, but its life was too short lived. If you also are among those unfortunate folks that have never tasted this cake, I will now give it my personal recommendation.

I will let you go to Cooks.com, as I did, and do the search. You will quickly realize that all the recipes are either the same, or very similar.

Here is why I like this cake. It is simple to make, but is very unusual and has an outstanding flavor. What makes it unusual is the way it is made. After greasing the cake pan, you cover the bottom of the pan with coconut and pecans. Then you pour the cake over that. Now here is where you get the uniqueness. You have made a topping out of butter, confectioners sugar and cream cheese. Then you spoon globs of this topping around the top of the cake. You do not smooth it or try to make it even, just a glob here and another glob there until you have just a tiny, glob left.

Take this tiny glob and carefully, I mean very carefully, while no one is looking, put it in your mouth. Wasn’t that good. Now you know it is going to be hard waiting on the cake to come out of the oven.

Well, seriously, at this point in the process, I am wondering if I chose the wrong recipe, because it doesn’t look all that special to me. But having faith, I stick it in the oven.

Well, as the cake bakes, the globs of tasty topping, find their own way into the cake. When the time is up and you take the cake out, you have what, in someone’s imagination, must have looked like the landscape of terrain hit by an earthquake, ergo the name of the cake.

Now when you serve this cake, you flip the bottom to the top so that the coconut and nuts are no longer hidden. And if you look at the sides of the slices of the cake, you will see how the sweet cream cheese topping has woven its way inside the cake.

Damn, that cake was good. It is just too bad I never make the same recipe twice. It has always been my rule to only cook a recipe once, because then I always have an excuse for failure. “Well, it was the first time I had made that recipe”.

I just remembered. There are 193 recipes for Earthquake Cake on Cooks.com. How lucky can I be? I still have 192 more excuses for failure.

Tags: Recipes