"Handmade*" Cake

When I found myself with the grandkids on a Thursday afternoon, I decided to "kill two birds with one stone" and do some of my Shabbat preparations with them. I also loved the idea of baking in my daughter's nice big oven. So we made cakes.

I used my fantastically easy no-fail basic cake recipe to which I added chocolate chips.

The youngest of that crew was very enthusiastic about helping, so I took advantage of the opportunity. We also did some basic math in English, since there are lots of numbers when baking cakes:

"We need 10 half-cups of flour. Two were from the now finished bag of flour, so how many more do we add from the full bag of flour?"

Even though the Second Grade had started barely a week before, she could calculate it all in her head. NO FINGERS!

We made 4 1/2 cakes. And I guessed the temperature correctly. If there's a dial, cakes generally do well when the dial almost points directly down, just slightly cooler. The "display" showed it as 270 degrees centigrade. Then I double-checked by googling on my phone. The numbers on my oven haven't been visible for years.

When the cakes were finished, we served the small one as a treat to all the kids. I just had a couple of "crumbs" to sample. Calories! Even though, rather inexplicably, most of those grandkids aren't noshers, it's hard to resist a cake straight out of the oven.

Once the cakes had cooled sufficiently, I packed up three, leaving my daughter one for Shabbat. The grandkids reported that the visit was fun.

Why is this post titled "Handmade*" Cake? Very simple. My granddaughter had never heard of mixing a cake by hand before. She called it "handmade." My daughter uses a mixer, and I don't. Of course, you can certainly mix the cake batter with an electric mixer, but I haven't had a functioning mixer for decades. It's just another thing to wash after baking, so I'm not interested. This one-bowl cake comes out perfectly fine when mixed by hand.