Polar bears should roll up and start high fiving me over this Coca-Cola cake. OH ONE JUST DID. It was really quick, so I can’t show you a picture. But I will share how to make a Coca-Cola cake with you, so maybe magical things can happen to you, too.
I mentioned to someone that I would eat just about anything made out of Diet Coke, because, obviously, Diet Coke is the best, and I was making a really convoluted joke about dieting that didn’t really play out the way I wanted it to. Then it was pointed out that you can actually make a cake out of Diet Coke. Or, well, regular Coca-Cola, because, Christ, you’re making a cake, go crazy.
I needed to make a cake for a friend’s birthday party tonight anyway (half of this is because I wanted to do something nice, the other half of it is the fact that if you show up to a party in New York with something you baked yourself, people will respond as though you just pulled someone out of the subway. Such wonderment!)
So! This is how you do you make that cake.
First of all you go to a grocery store, and you buy all these things, which is a nightmare, and also impossible, really. Grocery stores never have all the things you need. At the end, after two grocery stores, I figured “fuck the buttermilk” but I am a monster that way, and you probably are not. I don’t know. Maybe you are. Spoiler: the cake will still rise and look normal and be okay without buttermilk, which is not even a real kind of milk, but a sour impostor.
You will, ideally though, have these:
2 cups self-rising flour
2 cups sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 cup Coca-Cola
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups miniature marshmallows
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
.
Frosting:
1/2 cup butter
1 tablespoon cocoa
6 tablespoons Coca-Cola
1 box confectioner’s sugar, (1pound)
1/2 cup chopped pecans
First, turn your oven on to 350 degrees.
Then you rub flower and butter all over a 9 by 13 inch pan. I don’t have one of those. I have a round kind of pan, and damned if I am going to buy a new pan. You are supposed to “flour and butter it” which sounds saucy and provocative. I rubbed the shit out of that one pan I own with flour and butter. Like so:
So then you mix in two cups of flour with two cups of sugar in a bowl. You should absolutely use a larger bowl than the one I use. I make quite poor choices sometimes.
Then you dump the marshmallows, butter (2 sticks), cocoa and Coca-Cola into a saucepan. I think this can either mean a frying pan or the kind of pan you serve soup in. I own both because I am pretty much Julia Child. I used the sauce pan, and this was a pretty good choice.
I like to cut up the butter first, because it makes it easier to melt. When it’s brought to a boil (bubbles will form! Like you’re some sort of Shakespearian witch!) you should pour it into a large bowl with the flour and sugar mixture.
Not a plastic bowl. It will melt. I’ve made this mistake before.
It will, ultimately, look like this.
Now pop it into the floured pan (of any size or shape, really) and put it in the oven which should now be heated to 350.
And now you’re going to make the frosting, which is its whole own thing.
