Granny's Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350 and bring 3 eggs to room temperature. Grease and flour three 9 inch round cake pans.
Sift 2.5 cups flour, 1/2 cup Hershey's cocoa powder, 2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp salt together.
In separate bowl, cream 1 cup crisco or butter, 2 cups sugar for 3-4 minutes with a mixer.
Add 2 tsp vanilla extract and 3 eggs, one at a time and mix after each one.
Add a total of 1 cup of buttermilk and all the flour mixture, but in thirds alternating flour/buttermilk starting and ending with flour. Do not overbeat.
Add 1 cup boiling water and mix until smooth.
Bake at 350 about 25-27 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

Cool pans for 10 minutes then turn cakes out onto wire racks to cool completely. Once cakes are cool, make frosting.

Frosting:

Melt 1 stick butter in saucepan. Add 3.5 Tbs cocoa and stir until smooth. Add 5-7 Tbs
milk and bring to boil. Add 1 lb sifted confectioners sugar, 1 tsp vanilla and a dash of salt.

Let cool just a little but frost cakes while frosting is still warm enough to spread easily.

This is my favorite cake in the world. Granny, my mom's mom, makes this every year for my birthday and it is the best! She gave me the recipe a couple years ago and I finally got around to trying it. The writing in purple are things that she didn't include in the recipe that should be included for those of us who don't know what we're doing.

I had found some aprons online that I just thought were adorable so my parents printed out the pics, bought fabric and the pattern and Granny made me two for Christmas. How special is that?? Here's one of them, it's got cupcakes all over it. The other is pink and brown polka dots. I'm greasing and flouring the cake pans.


Somehow even with the awesome apron I still managed to get flour on my black shirt on the hip area. Anytime I use flour or powdered sugar I wind up covered in it.


The finished product from the top looks pretty good. Check out that cake stand...another new but vintage addition to the kitchen from Ebay. Love love love it!


Side view...not so good. I let the icing cool which was wrong because it was too thick and resulted in using way too much between the layers and not leaving any for the outside of the cake. I also need some work on evening up the layers so I don't have a leaning cake. This cake stand is huge, much wider than the standard sized cake pans so for presentation I think next time I'll decorate around the edges with chocolate covered strawberries or something similar so there's not so much blank space between the cake and the fluted edge of the stand. I also need to get a glass dome to cover the stand so the cake doesn't dry out.

Gran's are always much prettier and a little tastier, but it wasn't too terrible for a first attempt.