Toasted Marshmallow Chocolate Chip Cake

a redux of my Mom's favorite birthday cake

The last time my family was all together in the same place for an extended period of time was at the start of the COVID when I moved in with my parents in Virginia. My sister was living a 10-minute walk away with her newborn twins, and that was our pod for at least seven months until I moved back to Brooklyn. In August, my sister moved with her kids to New Jersey, about 40 minutes away from my apartment here — hey, that’s faster than I can get to Gowanus! My parents rented an apartment for a month so they could help get everyone settled and for a little vacation.

We’re grateful when we’re all in the same place for a birthday, and since my mom’s birthday was this past month, I thought I would make her a really special birthday cake. I didn’t think all the way through having to transport it… across two rivers… on the subway. (It actually wasn’t hard but I was stressed about it. I do this all to myself!)

If you’ve been following along with easygayoven for a while, you know that each family member has a specific favorite birthday cake and my mom’s is picnic cake. Most people have no idea what I’m talking about when I say picnic cake so I love when folks either 1) have had it and call the cake by some other name or 2) have a completely different cake that they entitled “picnic cake”. It’s all part of that folksy, passed-down, ahistorical path that all family recipes take.

Let me tell you what’s normal picnic cake is and then I’ll tell you more about how I transformed it into a layer cake. My family’s picnic cake is simply boxed yellow cake mix batter, poured into a 9x13 pan, sprinkled with chocolate chips and mini marshmallows, and baked. The chocolate chips sink to the bottom and the mini marshmallows go right to the edge of still-being-able-to-be-called-“toasted”-not-"burnt”. It’s a self-frosting cake. You don’t have to decorate it or worry about messing up during transport, and it’s easy to serve at, I don’t know, a picnic. You can read more about it as well as how I created my own rich yellow cake recipe for it here.

I can't... we had candles but their rental had no lighters or matches.

For this version, I split my souped-up yellow cake batter (with chopped chocolate mixed in) into three 6-inch round tins, baked them and trimmed off the domes so I could stack them. Then I covered them in plastic wrap while still warm and chilled them in the fridge overnight. This trick helps them retain a lot of moisture. Then I made a torched marshmallow Swiss meringue buttercream by cooking egg whites and sugar, whipping them up to stiff peaks, then alternating toasting the meringue with a blowtorch and beating it (which creates more surface area to toast and breaks down the scorched bits). After beating in butter a little bit at a time, you have a silky smooth, surprisingly complex frosting for the cake. To fill and crumb-coat the layers, I used a simple, salty chocolate ganache.

There are so many different cake pan sizes out there but I’ve tried to give you estimates for how long nine, eight and six-inch cakes would take to cook. You may find that your pans are too shallow to split the batter into two or three (you only ever want to fill up cake pans 1/2-2/3 of the way) so you may have to bake in batches, which is okay. Since pan material and color, plus oven accuracy, always vary, bake times are just estimates. Because of that, checking the cakes about five minutes early and relying on visual cues is a good idea here.

Toasted Marshmallow Chocolate Chip Cake

Makes a three-layer six-inch cake or a two-layer 8 or 9-inch cake

Ingredients

For the cake

• One batch yellow cake batter

• 1 heaping cup semisweet chocolate chips or chopped semisweet chocolate