This cake is up there with the Matilda Cake for my favorite desserts. It’s a variation on the Pioneer Woman’s Texas sheet cake combined with my mom’s classic peanut butter frosting. It is dense, sweet, and very chocolatey, and on top of all that, it’s peanutty! Could it get any better??
The peanut butter frosting is very forgiving–it’s a 1:1 ratio of peanut butter to powdered sugar combined with a bit of whipped cream.
The hashmark chocolate ganache tops it all off and is my mom’s signature design to this dessert, though she does it with much more flair than I do! That is just Baker’s semi-sweet chocolate with more whipping cream. For our next house, I need to get a tap for heavy whipping cream.
As a general note, I have found in my research that it is best to add vanilla and chocolate to the “fats” of your dessert. This is because fats coat the tongue, so you want the prominent flavors to be in that coating. Therefore add your vanilla directly into the egg yolks and the chocolate into the butter!
A helpful tip for getting your ganache (or any frosting) into a pastry or Ziploc bag is to shove the bag into a tall water glass and pull the edges over the rim. Then spoon or pour your ganache or frosting into the bag. This way keeps your bag upright and minimizes the mess!
Ingredients
For the cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup 2% milk plus 1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 sticks butter
1 cup hot water
2 tsp powdered coffee (optional)
1/2 cup Dutch processed cocoa
For the peanut butter frosting
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 cups creamy peanut butter
2 cups powdered sugar
For the chocolate ganache
4 oz Baker’s semi-sweet chocolate
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
Instructions
For the cake
Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking soda in a bowl and whisk together. Set aside.
In a separate bowl combine milk, lemon juice, eggs, and vanilla. Set aside.
In a medium sauce pan, melt butter and add water to it. Remove from heat and add in cocoa and coffee, if using.
When combined, add the butter-cocoa mixture to the flour-sugar mixture. Then slowly add the milk mixture too.
Whisk until combined. Pour batter into a jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes.
Allow to cool completely before frosting.
For the peanut butter frosting
With a hand or stand mixer, whip cream until soft peaks begin to form. Add the peanut butter and continue whipping. Slowly add sugar until the consistency is mostly firm, but can drip still. You may not use all 2 cups. Spread over cooled cake.
For the chocolate ganache
Melt chocolate in microwave in 20-second intervals. After the first two rounds, add whipping cream and continue microwaving in 20-second intervals until you can easily stir the melted chocolate and it’s a rich, dark brown color. Do not burn!
With a pastry or Zipbloc bag lining a water glass, pour ganache into bag and seal. Snip a corner and create first vertical and then diagonal lines with the chocolate over the peanut butter frosting.
Note: You can serve it right away, but the cake cuts most easily after it has chilled for an hour or two! I’d recommend cutting it with a pancake flipper and wiping it off (aka, gobbling up the cake/frosting stuck to the knife) clean between each cut.
This is different from the Pioneer Woman’s recipe in a couple of ways:
1. I don’t have buttermilk on hand. I just don’t. I probably should given how much I bake and cook, but I seem to get by just fine with slightly acid milk (milk+lemon). Maybe some time I will do a side-by-side comparison.
2. The reason buttermilk or acidic milk is called out in the recipe is to create a reaction with the baking soda. If you ever made a volcano in science class, you might remember that adding an acid (buttermilk) to a base (baking soda) will cause a pretty quick and fizzy reaction. This reaction is the release of carbon dioxide, or air bubbles. These bubbles are what lift the cake up so its fluffy and tall (well, tall-ish. It is a sheet cake!) I don’t want this reaction to happen until the cake is in the oven and beginning to warm up and rise! That is why I don’t combine the baking soda with the acidic milk until just before we pour the batter into the pan, whereas the Pioneer Woman recipe says to do it at the beginning. Who knows if it makes a difference? I’m probably just proud of my volcano experiment.
3. I add coffee powder to the cake. It does not have a distinctive coffee flavor; the coffee just enhances the chocolate-y-ness of the cake!
4. The frosting recipe is my mom’s!