La Luna Cooks Mrs. Yoder: Lazy Wife Cake

Perhaps I should have called the last La Luna Cooks Mrs. Yoder entry "Mortally Wounded." The project has come to an end (well, or shifted gears, really). Almost since the beginning, I have questioned whether that particular cookbook was a good one to cook all the way through. The recipes are incredibly repetitious. There are a whole lot of recipes that call for canning or pressure cooking, neither of which I was prepared to do. I was constantly having to cut the quantities significantly and, truth to tell, the math was a mite hard for me sometimes. It's one thing to halve a recipe. It's another to reduce something made to feed an entire congregation. And, to be completely honest, I just didn't love the food. Some of it was pretty good, to be sure, and there are still recipes I want to make from that cookbook. I didn't want to be a quitter, especially not so shortly after beginning. But to continue making food I was lukewarm about, food which wasn't particularly healthy in the first place, with so many of the ingredients being either processed or simply full or carbs and fat, seemed not only an unpleasant task, but irresponsible.

However, I need to blog about one last recipe adventure before moving on to the new cookbook. Last week, I made a recipe called Lazy Wife Cake. To me, a lazy wife cake would mean one purchased at the bakery and brought home. Or, at the very least, one from a mix. A lot of women of my acquaintance, frankly, consider themselves pretty enterprising if they do a cake from a box. This cake, however, is all from scratch. It's what I have often seen referred to as a "wacky cake," with vinegar in the mix. The vinegar didn't make me nervous, although the very small amount of cocoa powder for which the recipe called did, just a little.

The recipe calls for the baker to mix the dry ingredients (No Spoons! Forks Only!---Anyone know why this would be the preferred method?) and put them in a pan (size was not specified, so I went hunting for other "Lazy Wife Cake" recipes online and determined that an 8x8 pan would suffice), then to make little wells in the mixture for the liquid ingredients. Although my oil overflowed its hole, all was well and the resultant cake was lovely and lofty. It was a humble cake, fairly light and not terribly rich.

Because I am terribly picky about cake, I took one bite and decided that it wasn't worth the calories for me. My wife thought it was tasty and it apparently got rave reviews at her plant, where I sent the rest of it, so I think lots of folks would really dig it.