I made this in a four-tier hexagon pan set for the Shabbat Hekarut, tripling everything. Here's a recipe for a 9-inch cake, which is probably what you want, unless you're having 100 people over. Both the cake and frosting are from Rose Levy Berenbaum's "The Cake Bible", if you only own one cake cookbook, that should be it. The cake recipes in this book are a bit different from most, instead of creaming the fat and sugar, adding the eggs, and then the flour, they start with the flour and sugar, then the fat and liquid, and finally the eggs.
The cake says that it serves 12. That's 12 restaurant-sized enourmous slices. Most people will ask for a slice half that size, and some for just slivers.
The frosting usually comes out firmer than it did when I brought it to shul. I probably made a mistake when tripling the ingredients.
The dutch cocoa is important. I used to bring a few boxes of this from Zabar's each time I visited the US. Fortunately, Elite's chocolate is now dutch-processed. Dutch cocoa is a reddish brown, regular cocoa is just brown. They have a different pH, and react differently with baking powder. Baking is chemistry.
Always use real vanilla extract.
To make this pareve, substitute butter-flavored margaine for butter, and pareve cream (any brand) for the cream. Chocolate hides the synthetic flavor of pareve cream substitutes.
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