We probably make this harder than it needs to be because, for all the equipment we have, we don't have multiple 9x13 dishes. The fact that we only have one 9x13 means that whenever we prepare this cake, we're required to get it out of the 9x13, cut it in half parallel to the counter, fill it, and put it on the platter or other surface from which we intend to serve it. Getting this to work is by far the most difficult part of this recipe, which you can easily circumvent if you have two 9x13s. If you do, then simply take each pan's contents out, trim the bottom as necessary, frost between the layers, stack, apply a top coating of icing, and serve.
This cake begins as so many others do by preheating an oven. The recipe that we use in my family is my grandmother's take on a traditional cake, and this is more or less a translation of that recipe into English with my own commentary explaining why certain steps are going to be taken. The range in which this recipe was developed has five different oven temperature settings-- 1 is the hottest, and the oven can reach up to about 500°F; 5 is the coolest, and that's probably around about 240° or so Fahrenheit. You can't actually set the temperature of the oven like you can at the oven at our house in suburban Atlanta-- we have control up to a degree from about 160 to 550 °F, whereas the original oven only really has control up to the 40 or 50° Celsius range within which you want to bake or roast. This is why the original recipe asks for setting #4 plus or minus 40°; the bottom bound of gas setting #4 is 180° C. Converted to Fahrenheit, that's 356. (The top bound is 210° C, which is 410° F, so the only real guarantee in the original oven is that it'll bake somewhere between 356 and 410, requiring more testing than here in the US.) In the US, where we have degree-by-degree control, we've translated that to mean 360° Fahrenheit (even for American-developed recipes that call for cakes to be baked at 350°).
This is a good cake for any readers who might be lactose intolerant because it's dairy free. Instead of using butter to bring fat and moisture to the cake, the recipe calls for oil to achieve those same ends. At least since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been baking with avocado oil-- and contrary to what a lot of us assumed when we started with this, there's no avocado taste in places where we don't want an avocado taste, so cooking with avocado oil in this context is absolutely fine, even though I imagine the original recipe was probably developed with something like canola, and that definitely works. Just don't use olive, especially not extra virgin olive oil (because it can go rancid at high temperatures).
The cake calls for six eggs which are to be separated: whites beaten to stiff peaks and yolks creamed with sugar, oil, and a mixture of water and chocolate which we'll deal with later.
Beat the whites to stiff peaks and reserve them in one bowl. In another bowl, beat the yolks together with 3/4 of a cup of your chosen oil and two cups of white sugar. (You will need to beat the whites to stiff peaks before working with the yolks. Going in that order, you do not need to clean or change out your beaters in between the different phases of the egg.) Add to the yolk bowl one tablespoon of baking powder. This, together with the air incorporated into the whites by beating them into stiff peaks will provide the leavening the cake needs.
The original recipe doesn't call for this explicitly, but my grandmother used to do this, and I'm much worse at separating eggs than she was, so I do this, and I'll recommend that you do as well: of course, you need a bowl for the whites and one for the yolks. But her system, which I've now adopted, is to use two bowls for each: one for the current (white/yolk) and one for all the separated (whites/yolks). She was probably more concerned that an egg would be spoiled, and she didn't want to spoil the whole batch with a bad egg. I'm not so concerned with that, but I do know I'm much more liable to break a yolk and ruin my chances at a clean separation, so I follow her technique anyways. Crack the whole egg into the small white bowl. Transfer this particular yolk into the small yolk bowl. If the separation succeeds, transfer this yolk into the big yolk bowl, and this white into the big white bowl. If the separation fails, put all of the contents of the small "white" bowl (that is now temporarily a small yolk bowl due to the contamination) into the big yolk bowl, and clean the intended small white bowl. Neither white bowl can have any yolk contamination, nor can the beaters, eventually.
In fact, I lost an egg for that very reason while preparing the cake that inspired me to write this post. That's totally fine! If you break the yolk while cracking the egg or during the separation, just abandon the separation, and put the whole egg in the yolk bowl. Egg yolks can have egg whites in them, and they will still cream well with fat and sugar. But egg whites can't have egg yolk in them, or the unfolding of the protein structure required to beat the whites into stiff peaks will be much harder, if not impossible, to achieve.
(A quick aside, because these are the things that I like to communicate in these recipe posts: baking soda is a base-- if you look on a pH scale, it will be higher than that of water which is neutral. Baking powder includes baking soda, some sort of acid, and a buffer preventing action between them, which is usually corn starch. I'm not sure what the buffer is or what precisely the acid is, but it's important to know that those three components are in baking powder. When an acid and a base are allowed to come together by the buffer, they form water and release gas. When you're not using baking powder and it's just stored in your cupboard, it's stable because of the action of the buffer keeping the acid and the base from interacting with each other. But once you put the baking powder into a batter and add heat to that batter in the oven, the buffer deactivates and allows the acid in the base to come together, and when they do, they perform their neutralization reaction. The gaseous products of the neutralization, plus the vaporization of extra water we'll add later will provide the leaving for the cake.)
While beating the eggs start a kettle boiling 2/3 of 1 cup of water. In a third bowl, combine a total of 2/3 of a cup of Nesquik and cocoa powder. One cup is 16 tbsp, so in theory, if you wanted to combine the Nesquik and the cocoa powder in equal proportions, you would add 16 tsp of each to 2/3 of a cup of boiling water.
"Cream" together the oil, yolks, and sugar, and to that add the chocolate slurry and 2 cups of all-purpose flour. (I have placed that into quotes because the traditional meaning of that instruction is to combine eggs, butter, and sugar, not eggs, oil, and sugar, but the process is otherwise the same.) Then, fold in the whites with a rubber spatula. Take care to deflate the whites as little as possible -- some deflation will inevitably happen-- but fold in the whites thoroughly enough that no streaks remain visible.
Then, either place half of the batter into one 9x13 and half into another 9x13, or place it all into one 9x13 if that's all you have. Bake the cake(s) until a fork comes out clean.
If you have one cake, get it out of the 9x13 in one piece, invert it onto a cutting surface, and cut the cake maintaining your knife parallel to the cutting surface into a top half and a bottom half. Separate the two halves.
If you have two cakes, pick one to be the top half and one to be the bottom half. The top of the bottom half may have risen unevenly, creating a dome. If that's the case, trim the top of the bottom half so that the top of the bottom half is parallel to the bottom of the bottom half.
What scares me the most about this recipe isn't the eggs-- handling a separation that didn't work out is easy enough, as described above-- it's this step because cutting and moving slabs of cake in and out of large dishes hoping they don't disintegrate in transport (even just a foot or two) and ruin presentation is certainly the most nerve-wracking experience I have in a kitchen on a regular basis.
Once you have your cake halves -- however you got them-- mix together a blend of one cup of water and 2 teaspoons of Nesquik. Dock both halves of the cake: that is, make hundreds of tiny holes on the surface of the cake with a fork, almost as if the cake were to look like a Graham cracker (with the caveat that a Graham cracker's holes go all the way through it, and the holes in the cakes certainly should not).
Once the cake halves have been docked, make a filling (and icing) from chocolate, powdered sugar, 12 ounces of heavy cream, and 1 stick of butter. Adjust the chocolate quantity to change how dark you want it to be (and how bitter you want it), and adjust the sugar to change how sweet you want it to be.
Place the docked bottom half on the intended serving plate, then spread half of the frosting over the bottom half. Place the top half on the frosted bottom half, and spread the rest of the frosting on the top half.
Optionally garnish over the top frosting layer with chocolate sprinkles or chips.
Chill overnight and serve.
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