Flour on the Floor: Hot Fudge Pudding Cake

I am frequently faced with a dilemma when invited to a friend’s home for dinner—what dessert will appeal to adults and kids alike? I pour over cookbooks disqualifying one recipe after another. The kids don’t want fruit-based cobblers or crisps and most adults aren’t interested in a plate of cookies after dinner. That leaves me with cakes or bars. Brownies with vanilla ice cream is my typical choice but I wanted a new variable in the warm chocolate + dairy treat = dessert equation. Then I spy “Hot Fudge Pudding Cake” in Baking Illustrated.

The editors describe it as a “1950’s community cookbook recipe.” I know exactly what they mean—something at home in the various school fundraiser cookbooks we all have calling for ingredients like soup packets and crunched-up Ritz crackers. There are two things I know about these types of dishes: they are simultaneously horrible and horribly delicious.

My daughter and I don aprons and begin the recipe with the plan that we’ll take the pudding cake to dinner still warm from the oven then the cake can do its twenty-five minutes of required cooling while we all eat. Voila, perfect timing, perfect dessert.

I tell my daughter to hold off on her measuring of the baking powder while I double-check the recipe to confirm the number of teaspoons and that it’s powder—not its neighbor soda—that we are baking with. I give her the okay and she smiles while carefully leveling and says, “Yeah, we’re not gonna do this the boy way, right?” When I ask what she means, she shrugs and explains, “You know the boy way, like Daddy and my brother set up the Triops tank.” (For the uninitiated, Triops are this generation’s Sea Monkeys—billed as hard to mess up barely-pets you can sell your kid on when they ask for something furry).

My daughter is referring to the fact that the tank holding what should have already hatched into my son’s new “fish” instead has floating dormant eggs and is leaking water onto his wood dresser. In other words: they didn’t follow the directions. In their defense, it turns out that the mail-order instant-pet Triops are ridiculously fussy, requiring 73 degree non-tap water that has not been purified via distillation, reverse osmosis, or deionization. These freeze-dried shrimpy creatures also like crushed carrots and constant light. Freaks . I’m beginning to think the hamster I rejected might have been easier after all.

Yet, I’m intrigued by my daughter’s classification of their pet blunders as the “boy” way. I watched my little girl take her first wobbly steps and celebrated the recent loss of her first tooth and now we have reached another, less encouraging, milestone: her first stereotype. I don’t think I’ll mark this one in her baby book (actually, as a stereotypical second child, she doesn’t even have one).

Society-endorsed labels are hard to shake. Boys take longer to mature. Girls are bad at math. Boys are aggressive. Girls are more verbal. In fact, JCPenney recently promulgated some gender stereotypes with a line of T-shirts meant for girls aged 7-16. One said, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” They hit two sets of assumptions at once—boys are smart and pretty girls are not. The shirts were recently pulled from the shelves; but that doesn’t change the fact that they were conceived, then presumably approved by a number of people before they were green-lit and shipped all over the country.

Most of us are guilty of indulging such stereotypes by telling or laughing at jokes about golf-playing doctors, dumb blondes or men who won’t ask for directions. In fact, entire comedy careers have been built upon lampooning the differences between groups with routines that either sympathize or ostracize. We accept stereotypes as part of our common experience.

Fifteen years ago, I met my husband’s grandmother for the first time and ran into one of her long-held, unflattering stereotypes. As she was stuck behind a driver who kept tapping the brakes, she shook her head and said, “It’s probably an Oriental driver.” I was shocked speechless at her casual, un-ironic delivery. It struck me that she was busy pigeon-holing others as she drove her extra-long, low car from her Florida retirement condo to eat a 4:30pm dinner at a restaurant. And when I reported the comment to my mother-in-law, she said, half-jokingly, “Right, because they can’t see over the steering wheel.” And so it goes.

When it comes to gender differences, specifically in regard to children, I tread carefully, encouraging each of my children to engage in whatever activities strike their fancy. After my daughter’s comment I asked her and my son, together, what types of things boys and girls like to do. My daughter, the little sage, said, “Boys and girls are different. Girls like to play baby and dress like mermaids. Boys like to play video games and wrestle.” And while it is true that my son is the only one who has pulled me into a “sleeper hold” while I’m trying to make dinner, my daughter agreed that she too likes wrestling and that both boys and girls enjoy drawing. My son, older by three years, offers helpfully, “Boys go to Mars for candy bars and girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” Thus confirming the gender/maturity level stereotype.

The reality behind stereotypes is that they can contain grains of truth; that’s why comedians use them. Though, my mother-in-law was joking with her comment about short drivers, it does raise and exaggerate another, truer stereotype about the average height of the Asian population. We all generalize our experiences with a small number of people to include a larger group. We clump people together based on gender, race, religion, age and even hair color. Psychologists say that stereotyping is an efficient way to mentally organize information; it helps us simplify and predict the world around us. We need the shortcuts.  

I want to try to minimize this type of simplifying as much as I can with my children. I try to explain to my daughter that Daddy and her brother are just two people and that not all boys are the same. She seems dubious about my comments as she carefully and expertly cracks an egg. It strikes me then, and only then, four months into this project, that perhaps I applied some stereotyping of my own when I conceived the idea of baking elbow to elbow with my daughter and writing about it. I did invite my son, but it was an afterthought (and quickly turned down anyway). Did I choose her because she is a girl? Isn’t baking the quintessential girl activity? How many Better Crocker Easy Bake Ovens were sold to boys? And, of those, how many were used to cook things other than bugs?

I tell myself that my daughter was the logical choice because of her shorter school days and more available time, but the idea lingers as we prepare the Hot Fudge Pudding Cake. I underestimate a few things: the number of bowls required to make this recipe (too many) and the amount of time it will take (too long).  At some point I give up on the idea of showing up with a prepared dessert in hand and turn off the oven; we’ll bake it there, that’s better anyway, I think optimistically.

We leave for dinner with the still-cold mix in a baking dish. The kids are fed first and by the time the adults eat, the dessert has been sitting for almost an hour and a half before it goes into the oven. When it comes out, the result is, well, unappetizing. Now, Baking Illustrated is very clear when they say: “Hot Fudge Pudding Cake is definitely not a dessert for entertaining; it does not impress with its looks. It’s a humble, homely dessert…”

The chocolate is burnt on top and full of bumps. It borders on embarrassing to serve. Let me be clear—if this arrived on your plate in a restaurant, you’d take one look at the runny, soupy mess and send it back. Unless it was a Grant Achatz restaurant, then you’d accept it humbly and be grateful that you got a reservation at all.

As it drips over the edges of our plates, it strikes me that this looks like the type of dessert a boy might make—thrown together with whatever ingredients are on hand and with little regard to resting and cooking times. A college boy might present this proudly to his family at Thanksgiving. A bachelor might trot it out on a third date. And my own stereotypes are revealed again.

We scoop ice cream and eat up. At first my husband doesn’t like the dish saying it’s much more pudding than cake but as he continues eating he admits that it’s pretty good. The host says that, looks aside, it tastes good from the first bite and adds, “There’s nothing acquired about it.” The kids clean their plates too. With all of our perceived and real differences, we still are alike enough to sit around a table sopping up a delicious, ugly dessert, together.