Unsupervised Chocolate Cake.

This cake has three major influences, all of which came together, when I was fifteen, into a cake that a person...well, probably shouldn't eat. These influences are, in order:

1. The revelation that melted chocolate will seize up and get nasty if cold liquid is added to it, but that if it's heated with liquid, magic happens.
2. The war cookbook: dedicated to General MacArthur, this book was my joy of cooking. Except, instead of telling me how to make an omelet or how to debone a chicken, it focused on instruction of patriotic young housewives in making do without eggs, butter, fresh milk, or tin cans, without ever denying their family a hot, nutritious, home-cooked meal.
3. For the first time in my life, I was often home alone. My father lived on the west coast; my brother was away at college, and my mother, on friday afternoons, would drive out to the western part of the state, to pick him up. So I was left to my own devices.

This is the result, a decadent, crisp-outside, fudgey inside, strange-ass chocolate cake.

Thus:

Unsupervised Chocolate Cake, or The Cake that Shouldn't Be.

Ingredients:

2 and 1/4 cups white flour.
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon, salt

1 cup white sugar
1/4 cup corn syrup
2/3 cup milk
3 rounded tablespoons, mayonnaise
1 teaspoon, vanilla
1 dark chocolate candy bar.
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 stick butter

Set a large mixing bowl over a pot of water, to create a crude double boiler. Put over medium heat. Preheat oven to 375. Grease and flour a nine-inch square cake pan, like a motherfucker.

Combine all dry ingredients, except 1/4 cup of the flour and set aside.

Break up your chocolate bar, and put it, milk, sugar, vanilla, cocoa powder, the rest of the flour, and the butter over the double boiler. Stir, keeping the milk from boiling, until the mixture is thick, the butter is melted, and the chocolate is incorporated. Remove from heat, add mayonaise to hot mixture, stir very well, add flour mixture, dump into cake pan and bake until it doesn't jiggle at all. (Possibly 45 minutes, maybe longer- it doesn't matter, there're no eggs in it. Serve hot hot hot with a spatula. Or, serve covered in cheap canned chocolate frosting, powdered sugar, or generic cool whip.

The texture will be about 1/3 cake, 1/3 brownie, 1/3 pudding. Do not be upset if the sides crisp and the middle is somewhat gooey, but not flowy. That's success, not failure. Absolute success.

Until you realize that you're eating a cake which is mostly held together with mayonnaise.

Then you'll just have to deal with it.