In case you have forgotten, tucked in way down there in your warm and cozy bunker, Sunday is Valentine’s Day. I hesitate to mention this, just in case you live in a well-ordered, well-organized and completely efficient fashion. Unlike our household, where Mr. Friday is constantly amazed to find out that Christmas rolls around, like clockwork, every year. Moreover, he is out of town at an annual industry event over Valentine’s Day every year, so commercialized romance doesn’t even blip onto his radar. No over-priced flowers, gilded chocolates or even cheap sentiment comes my way on February 14. Woe is me!
Unless your true love is out of town for business, you had best get cracking some eggs. Nothing says loving like something warm and chocolate-y, especially in the midst of a winter’s gelid weekend. Get thee to the kitchen and pre-heat the oven. It is time for chocolate love.
If Amanda Hesser can juggle twins, school lunches, write books, manage a mega-fabulous food website with good humor and genius ideas, AND bake a cake on a weeknight, I think we are up to the challenge of baking her Dump It Cake with just a little bit of character building. https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/9404-chocolate-dump-it-cake
And we needn’t restrict ourselves to just chocolate, although it is a great indicator of love, there are other types of dump it cakes that you might want to try. Death by chocolate is such a cliché these days, don’t you think? I draw the line at kale, though. https://www.babble.com/best-recipes/the-easiest-cakes-ever-6-dump-cakes-youll-crave/
Time spent together in the kitchen is time well spent, as the wise ones say. We should be preparing and cooking all our own food, as a way to limit the processed foods we can so easily and mindlessly consume over the course of a normal, stressful, crazy day. We need to slow down. Break some eggs. Peel grapes. Eat seasonal produce. Stay away from the high fructose corn syrup and start to feel better and healthier. Get eight hours of sleep. Breathe.
That being said, the following recipe uses a cake mix, but some of us cannot embrace lofty Utopian ideals every day. Sometimes we need to get dinner on the table, and a romantic, multi-layered, carefully crafted, organic, artisanl, locally-sourced baked good is the last thing with which we can possibly cope. Still, this recipe is better than stopping at the convenience store and toting home an Entemann’s chocolate cake, even though I have consumed a couple of dozen delicious Entemann’s cakes in my lifetime, too, and very good they were. This is an easy fix, and no one but you knows what goes on in the kitchen, thus spaketh our kitchen goddess, Julia Child. It’s the power of love. https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/ultimate-chocolate-pudding-dump-cake-52818381
If you, like me, are going to be alone on Valentine’s Day, take heart! And follow the savvy suggestions here: https://www.tastingtable.com/cook/national/valentines-day-ideas-single-on-valentines-day-dessert-for-one-mug-cake-recipe
But in these trying times, one should also consider the wisdom of leftovers. I am going to bake Amanda Hesser’s Chocolate Dump It cake for myself on Sunday, and will serve what’s left to Mr. Friday when he comes home on Tuesday. And maybe we will have flowers and candlelight, too. Carpe diem.
“My greatest strength is… common sense. I’m really a standard brand – like Campbell’s tomato soup or Baker’s chocolate.”
-Katharine Hepburn
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