My Go-To Cake Recipe - Mint Chocolate Angel Food Goodness - And Some S'mores Obscenity

I posted about it last week - in fact I gushed about it last week, so I guess it would be rude to go on and on and not post a recipe, right? And since I forgot my camera and therefore have no new photos to post, today will be recipe day!

Luckily it is perhaps the world's easiest recipe to remember so I can recite it off the top of my head:

INGREDIENTS

Angel Food Cake (a box or your favorite recipe)

1qt heavy whipped cream

1 cup sugar

1 tsp peppermint extract

4 heaping tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

Okay, the angel food: buy box, follow directions, use angel food cake pan. (Easy so far, right? I'm embarrased to admit that until I ran across a from-scratch recipe on martha stewart dot com a couple weeks ago, I thought all angel food cakes came from a box - bangs head on desk)

So your cake is made and cooling upside down on a bottle.

Now you get out a quart of heavy whipped cream, poor in a deep bowl 'cause this can get messy.

Add 4 heaping tbsp cocoa powder. Add 1 tsp peppermint extract. Add 1 cup sugar (I usually skimp a bit on this - 1/2 cup or 3/4 cup, you'll be fine) then whip till firm peaks rise. Then refrigerate for an hour.

Then you're gonna take a big long serrated knife and cut your cake into four layers. Cut one, put on a platter, slather in whipped cream minty goodness. Cut another and repeat. When they are all piled on top of each other with whipped cream between the layers, you go to town whipped creaming the outside.

There will be leftover whipped cream - and that is an utter shame. Make it disappear. I have my way of doing this, you have yours. Moving on...

Then you can take a bar of baking chocolate and grate some chocolate shavings on the top to pretty it up. Then stick 'er in the fridge til it's time to serve. It's kinda sloppy but the sloppier it is, I swear the better it tastes.

BONUS RECIPE

OK, then if Auntie Desi is visiting, you take her advice and fire up the fire pit the next night. You make what she calls "s'mores" but they are unlike any kind of s'more you've ever had in life. Here's how: buy some pre-made brownies (or make a couple batches if you have time), cut them in half, or hey, just take two brownies, either way you need a brownie sandwich - slap on a healthy helping of marshmallow cream (or marshmallows that works too) then toss on a layer of peanut butter cups, sandwich it all together, wrap in tin foil and toss on the coals for I don't know 5-10 minutes? Then everybody change into elastic waistbands, grab a fork, unwrap that melty chocolatey marshmallow/peanut buttery goodness and go loco...in a very good way.