Guy Fawkes Day cake (p. 724)

Guy Fawkes Day! My ex-boyfriend introduced me to the holiday--I (sadly) think he was an admirer of the man. If you don't know who Guy Fawkes was (and I think he's a mystery to everyone outside the UK), I really recommend the Wikipedia page--Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament. Apparently, in the UK, they burn an effigy of him in honor of the holiday. In the US, nobody has any idea who he was, so effigies are safe. Most importantly, in my opinion, the origin of the word "guy" referring to person is due to Guy Fawkes, which is one of those pieces of useless trivia that I absolutely love.

I actually wrote this entire blog--on time--and it deleted itself (damn you interwebs!). I really hate rewriting blogs ::whine:: ::whine::

In honor of the holiday, I decided to make a Guy Fawkes Day cake (p. 724). The cake was pretty simple. First step, combine butter and molasses in a pot. I actually ran out of molasses and was trying to figure out if I was going to go the grocery store or give up on the cake, when I decided to search my cupboards (they are overly full and I regularly buy strange things)--I found more molasses. Why in the world do I have so much molasses? Especially when I'm trying to use up cupboard stuff in case of a future move...



Flour, oats, sugar, ginger, cloves, salt, baking soda, and a little grated lemon zest were combined in a bowl:



Half the molasses mixture was mixed in, then some milk, the rest of the molasses mixture, and some more milk. It was mixed until moist. When I first read it, I thought it said "just moist" and got a little worried:



That's a heckava lot more moist than "just". I poured it into a square pan and popped it in the oven:



It was really good! This is definitely a cake that you have to like molasses to enjoy. I love molasses and I thought it was delicious, like a giant molasses cookie. But molasses IS the overwhelming flavor, so I could understand if there were people didn't like it. I whipped up (literally!**) some whipped cream to go with the cake and it was perfect. I don't have much of a sweet tooth, so this cake had the perfect amount of sweetness. And I really don't like frosting, so a frosting-free cake was right up my alley.

This cake stayed good forever. Honestly, a week later, the cake was still moist. Bizarre!


**Totally off-topic but the misuse of the word "literally" drives me nuts. I hate when people say that something "literally makes their head explode" or that "their heart literally exploded". NO IT DIDN'T! You would be dead! You mean figuratively. FIGURATIVELY! That is my number one pet peeve.