The Unexpectedly Doughnut-esque Cake: or, Fun with electric mixers!

Sometimes, the greatest gift comes from a thrift store.

Doughnut-esque Cake ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar ¼ tsp salt (omit if using salted butter) ¼ tsp cinnamon* 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cup flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round pan. Beat butter, sugar, salt, and cinnamon. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat on high speed until it is thoroughly whipped, about 10 minutes. Add the flour, gently stirring just until all is mixed. Spread the batter into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes. It's done when a toothpick in the center comes out clean. When the cake is done, whisk together the icing and pour it on.     Icing: 2 tbsp butter 3 tsp water Tiny pinch of salt 1 tsp vanilla or so 2 tbsp cocoa powder 1 cup powdered sugar In a microwave safe bowl (a 2-cup measuring cup also works), melt the butter with the salt and water. Stir in vanilla. Then whisk in cocoa and powdered sugar. Stir until smooth. Add more powdered sugar if it's too thin, or a tiny bit more water if it's too thick. Pour the icing over the cake right after it's out of the oven, and tilt the pan back and forth to help it spread. Wait until the cake is ready before making the icing. The icing doesn't sit and wait very well-- it hardens instead. *You want to add just enough cinnamon to subtly change the flavor, but not enough that it's recognizable.

One of my friends repairs and sells vintage stereos. He likes to trawl thrift stores looking for future fix-and-sell projects. This thing came to the house instead.

The googly eyes appeared on it while I was asleep.

We don't need a second mixer, but we got it anyway. We left the price stickers on it as proof of how little we paid. Some people love to brag about how expensive things were, but all of my friends boast about how much something didn't cost them. We say things like "It would have been $250, but I found it on the clearance rack! Seventy-five percent off!"

The motor on this thing uses 231 watts at highest speed. For reference, that's like using 4 or 5 handmixers at the same time. To inaugurate our new high-powered silver treasure, I decided to use it for something that you can't do by hand without punishing yourself: leavening a particularly heavy cake batter by beating the snot out of it.

We went with 1234 cake, which is so dense that it sits in the ambiguous zone between cakes and bar cookies. I wanted to see if we could use the mixer to leaven the cake by brute force. When I make this,  I usually cream the butter and sugar until they look like this before adding the flour. It's definitely "beaten until fluffy" as many recipes dictate, even if it doesn't look like it in that large bowl.

But today, I cracked in the egg and turned our new kitchen friend to its highest speed and let it keep running until the batter looked like cake frosting. (Note: I did this before adding the flour. We all know that beating cake batter for ten minutes after adding the flour will turn your cake into a frosted doorstop.)

You could already see a difference as we got the batter in the pan. It looked a lot fluffier than it usually does.

This cake somehow produced a crispy-crackly top layer as it baked, as if I made brownies. I guess I can call this the magic of beating a half-hectowatt-hour into the cake batter: the cake gets shiny on top.

When we cut into the cake, we found that it had a much finer-grained texture than any other 1234 cake I've made. It was still dense in the best way possible, but it somehow didn't seem that way. I also noticed that the slight cinnamon (enough to make a difference, but not enough to recognize) made the cake taste oddly like doughnuts. So I put a thin chocolate glaze on it-- the kind that you only eat on doughnuts at 5AM.

Given how nicely this cake came out, I highly suggest letting your mixer have its well-beaten way with your recipes. The resulting creation is delicate like a cake, but rich and dense like brownies. Also, why would you purchase an electric mixer if you're not going to use it?