Kitchen Project #201: Texas Sheet Cake

Big. Chocolate. Cake.

Hello,

Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. Thank you so much for being here.

Today, we welcome back the ever-brilliant Bronwen Wyatt to take on another North American Classic: Texas Sheet Cake. In case you’ve never heard of it, it might be the chocolate cake to end all chocolate cakes. I’ll let her tell you more.

Over on KP+, Bronwen has developed her own take on the lesser-known White Texas Sheet Cake, but with a palette of beautiful flavours: Brown butter, Walnut, Rye & Nocino. Genius. Click here for the recipe.

What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level-up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter (including the commissioning - and fair payment - of all the writers), join a growing community, access extra content (inc. the entire archive) and more. Subscribing is easy and costs only £6 per month or £50 per year. Why not give it a go? Come and join the gang!

Love,
Nicola

A Cake By Any Other Name

by Bronwen Wyatt

Texas Sheet Cake Credit: Bronwen Wyatt

A Texas sheet cake is a broad, shallow chocolate cake, topped with a cocoa-based icing and a scattering of pecans. Like many desserts beloved in the southern United States, it bears many names: Funeral Cake, Texas Sheath Cake, Mexican Chocolate Cake, or Texas Brownie Cake are just a few. The cake develops its unique texture through the application of poured icing while the cake is still warm from the oven. The buttery, fudgy glaze sinks into the cake, creating a strata of tender chocolate cake at the bottom, a thin, slightly grainy patina of frosting on the top, and a molten zone in the centre that is an amalgam of both. The nuts, nearly always pecans, though walnuts make the occasional appearance, provide a bit of crunch. Despite its simplicity, the cake packs an outsized punch. It’s a breeze to put together, feeds a crowd, and remains tender for days on end. When I set out to develop my own version, I didn’t expect the work to be particularly difficult. What followed instead was two weeks of often-frustrating introspection.

I’ve eaten my fair share of Texas Sheet Cakes, though before this project, I’d never made one myself. When I begin researching a recipe, my first step is to create a spreadsheet that compares as many publicly available recipes as I can find. I source these recipes from larger news outlets, such as the New York Times or Southern Living, but I also look to smaller blogs, my cookbook collection, and Reddit. Reddit, in particular, is a great place to find images of handwritten recipe cards from home cooks, who are, after all, the ones responsible for carrying cake traditions through time (seek out r/Old_Recipes for your own deep dives). Texas Sheet Cake is often attributed to former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, though the Library of Congress’s own investigation couldn’t establish a link. The earliest known printed version, “Mrs Elkin’s Sheath Cake” from the Junior League’s Huntsville Heritage Cookbook, wasn’t published until 1967, though older family recipes can be found on multiple Reddit threads. It’s unclear that it has much of anything to do with the state of Texas, beyond the inclusion of pecans (which are indigenous to the state) and its size (“everything’s bigger in Texas”).

A slice of Sheet Cake. Credit: Bronwen Wyatt

It’s also sometimes flavored with cinnamon, which is why it is occasionally called Mexican Sheet Cake. A quick note: the pairing of chocolate and cinnamon is sometimes referred to as Mexican in American baking as a shorthand for that flavor profile, with or without the addition of chiles. While chocolate was first cultivated in present-day Mexico and Central America, it wouldn’t have been prepared with cinnamon until European colonization brought that spice to North and South America. Mesoamerican cultures like the Maya and Aztecs paired chocolate with foods they had access to, like chiles, maize, and vanilla. After colonization, the pairing of chocolate and cinnamon became identified with Mexican culinary tradition, as in the iconic Mexican hot chocolate brand Abuelita.

I’m far from the first person to tackle an updated version of a Texas Sheet Cake. Still, what struck me the most after comparing the older Texas Sheet Cake recipes was their remarkable similarity to each other. A source might market their version as their grandmother’s particular iteration, even though it is nearly the exact recipe published in multiple other places. I don’t think this is a question of intellectual property theft (you can’t copyright a recipe anyway). Rather, it’s a testament to Texas Sheet Cake’s unusual consistency across time, place, and among different family traditions.

When I’m tinkering with a beloved recipe like this one, I’m often confounded by what my end goal ought to be. Am I attempting to make the best-ever version of a Texas Sheet Cake, or am I attempting to make the truest version of a Texas Sheet Cake? The former might entail introducing all sorts of fancy techniques or expensive ingredients. The latter process is often far more personal. It’s about determining whether there is consensus on what the dessert is and which elements must be preserved. Here, more than any other dessert I’ve re-imagined, there is strong agreement for what a Texas Sheet Cake ought to be. The largest controversy I can pinpoint is the inclusion of cinnamon in the chocolate cake batter. For some people, cinnamon is essential. Other recipes don’t include it. You might find minor variations in the liquid of the batter (water or coffee), the acidic dairy (buttermilk or sour cream), or the fat (melted butter, shortening, or oil). Besides that, the ratios, and recipes, are largely the same. Here, then, is the average Texas Sheet Cake recipe, cobbled together from ten separate sources:

The average Texas Sheet Cake

The cocoa powder measurement listed above would arguably make the biggest difference to flavor. But in the recipes I surveyed, the lesser amount (¼ cup) was often listed as “four heaping tablespoons”, which could very well be closer to the greater amount (½ cup). Since these older recipes rarely list measurements by weight, I’ve preserved the range as-is. All of these recipes begin with blooming cocoa in melted fat and water (or coffee) before stirring this mixture, with the remaining liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. The glaze is always assembled in a pot on the stovetop and applied while warm. One popular recipe, from the Pioneer Woman blog by Ree Drummond, calls for folding the pecans into the glaze before spreading. The rest have you sprinkle the nuts on top.

Texas Sheet Cake of Theseus

The Texas Sheet Cake Test. Credit: Bronwen Wyatt

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the Ship of Theseus, a philosophical problem that asks us how much of the original elements must remain in order for an object to maintain its identity. In the puzzle, Theseus’s ship embarks on an annual voyage to honor the god Apollo. As the years wear on, parts of the ship must be repaired - a new mast is erected, the hull is replaced, the sails are made new. If, after a century, every element of the ship has been replaced, is it still the Ship of Theseus?

How much of this Texas Sheet Cake recipe can we tweak before it is no longer recognisably a Texas Sheet Cake? I baked Ree Drummond’s version, which uses all butter and buttermilk, while I pondered the problem. Reader, it was good! After all, I like sugar, and I like cake, so I was really bound to enjoy it. It required no great skill to make. It sat on my countertop for most of a week, and due to the generous blanket of buttery glaze, its texture remained largely unchanged. It is very sugary, as you might expect from the nearly full pound of confectioner’s sugar involved. If your palate has a low tolerance for that sort of bracing sweetness, you’d have a hard time getting through a whole slice.

Normally, in this situation, I would then begin the painstaking process of determining what ingredient swaps I’d make to refine my own version. I’d bake through every iteration (brown versus white sugar, buttermilk versus sour cream, water versus coffee). I even began the process, making a version with coffee in place of water. I also couldn’t resist baking this version by the revered food scholar Toni Tipton Martin that uses Dr. Pepper, an ode to the tradition of Southern cola cakes.

Here’s the thing: both the second and third cake were good, but they were only subtly different from the original. They didn’t tackle what were, in my mind, Texas Sheet Cake’s biggest drawbacks: its sweetness, and the mildness of the chocolate flavor (more on that later). Enter my greatest crisis since Coffee Cake or American Biscuits. Was I really going to bake through all of these variations, just to end up with a recipe that was only marginally different from every other recipe out there? Or should I make more forceful edits, risking the inherent identity of Texas Sheet Cake in the process? I get this sounds hyperbolic. Perhaps I’m feeling especially emotional about translating American cultural foods for a broader audience at this moment, when the United States is waging a reckless, brutal war against democratic norms worldwide. Regardless of the reason, I felt morally opposed to cheffing this recipe up, but I didn’t adore the cake in its original state, either. So I ping-ponged between these two feelings for a ridiculously long time, which was just as unproductive as it sounds.

Finally, after much handwringing, I decided that any adapted Texas Sheet Cake must abide by these rules:

• The primary flavors should be chocolate and pecan (and perhaps cinnamon).

• It should be so simple to put together a child could make it. This means, to me, that the batter need only to be stirred together: no creaming of butter and sugar, no separating of eggs.

• The cake must be thin, with the dimensions of a traybake.

• The glaze must be applied while the cake is warm, so that it can penetrate the crumb of the cake.

• The glaze must, when cooled, have the matte, lightly set, fudgy quality of the original. No corn syrup for gloss, no velvety ganache. “Grainy” is not a word we generally feel positively about when it comes to baked goods, but in this case, the slight graininess of fudge candy or penuche is inherent to the identity of a Texas Sheet Cake frosting.

More than anything, the cake needs to be recognizable as a Texas Sheet Cake should it be whisked from my hands through an interdimensional portal and plopped onto a table at a barbecue in my mom’s hometown of Midland, Texas in 1975.

On KP+ Today:

Walnut, Nocino, and Brown Butter Texas Sheet Cake

Over on KP+, I’ve let my imagination run wild with an adaptation of a White Texas Sheet Cake, a lesser-known version of the dessert that retains the general format but omits the chocolate. My spin is unapologetically cheffy, with brown butter, rye, walnuts, and nocino.

At last, it was time set to work.

Natural versus Dutch Processed Cocoa

First and foremost, my version of the cake needed to have a more pronounced chocolate flavor. Most American supermarkets only stock “natural” cocoa powder, powdered cocoa solids that generally have a low fat content and relatively high acidity. Growing up, the only brand of cocoa powder I ever saw on the shelf, or baked with, was Hershey’s, a natural cocoa powder. As a result, the majority of traditional chocolate cake recipes in the US are leavened with baking soda and also feature an acidic dairy, like buttermilk. The natural acidity of the cocoa powder, in concert with the acidic dairy, activates the baking soda and provides lift to the crumb, which will have a signature slightly reddish color. However, natural cocoa powder, especially lower-quality supermarket brands, doesn’t have a particularly deep chocolate flavor, and can sometimes be a bit chalky and bland. This is another one of those situations where nostalgia and innovation tug at each other. If everyone only has access to Hershey’s, then everyone’s Texas Sheet Cakes will always taste the same, a flavor throughline to the past. Supermarket, low-fat brands of natural cocoa lend the “original” Texas Sheet Cake a mild, kid-friendly flavor, but it just doesn’t suit my current palate. Happily, Dutch-process cocoa, which has been alkalized to lower its acidity and often has a richer flavor, is becoming more widely available in US supermarkets. Most often, I see the Droste brand in stores here:

Droste Tin Credit: Alf van Beem, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Apropos of nothing, but this cocoa powder lends its name to the Droste Effect, wherein the label features a smaller image of the tin, featuring the same image, which must therefore logically extend on into infinity, or at least as long as the legibility of the pixels allows.

Of course, this whole debate is academic for those of you in the UK and Europe, since you’ll generally have much broader access to Dutched cocoa, (for a deeper dive, check out Nicola’s commentary in her own treatise on chocolate cake). Dutch-process cocoa is often higher in fat, and can produce a deeper, more chocolatey flavor in baked goods. For that reason, it’s the cocoa of choice for most pastry chefs, and is slowly being adopted by more home cooks on this continent as well. Here in the States, I source Cacao Berry Dutched cocoa online. I adapted the sheet cake to use Dutch-process cocoa by omitting some of the baking soda and replacing it with baking powder. I then upped the total amount of cocoa powder, with a little more buttermilk to balance the moisture level. There’s no need to adapt the glaze, since the frosting doesn’t rely on a chemical reaction with the cocoa’s acidity. The result was an immediate success: the cake was less overtly sweet, and had a lovely, fluffy texture.

Still, the glaze was sweeter than I preferred. I tried adding in some melted chocolate, but I felt like it changed the character of the glaze too much, and didn’t set into the matte sheen I was aiming for. So instead, I swapped in buttermilk for the milk and added a healthy dose of salt for some much-needed salinity and acidity to balance the sweet. I’m also using a bit less overall glaze.

Texas Sheet Cake made in London by Nicola!

At this point, I had to make a decision about the cinnamon. I did try a version with the spice in the cake, and while it was perfectly tasty, I’m just not convinced that chocolate cake is my favorite delivery vehicle for cinnamon. I’m including it as optional in the recipe if you’d like to try that version.

The toasted pecans of the original cake are lovely and simple, but if we’re going to have nuts on top of a cake, I want them to be deeply crunchy. I initially made a cinnamon- toffee coating for the pecans, which was absolutely delicious until I remembered that I’d decided the cake needs to be easy-to-make as part of its ethos, and we can’t have the kids making dry caramel. So we’re doing a subtle cinnamon and honey coating on the pecan instead, though if you’re short on time you can of course skip the candying (but don’t skip the toasting, which is essential to bringing out the pecan’s flavor).

Finally, I borrowed a tip from Granny Brown and baked the cake in a 9” x 13” inch dish rather than the traditional half sheet tray. While you’ll nearly always see Texas Sheet Cake baked in a thinner layer, bumping up the proportion of the cake to glaze helped further balance the sweetness for me. This is perhaps my largest deviation from tradition, but if it’s good enough for Granny, it’s good enough for me.

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RECIPE: Texas Sheet Cake

by Bronwen Wyatt

Ingredients

For the pecans:

• 15g Caster sugar

• 10g Corn Syrup

• 10g Honey

• ¼ tsp Kosher salt (Sub flaky salt)

• ⅛ tsp Cinnamon

• 140g Pecans, raw, roughly chopped

For the cake:

• 240g All-purpose flour

• 200g Light brown sugar

• 200g Granulated sugar (or superfine)

• 1 ¼ tsp Baking powder

• 1 tsp Kosher salt (sub for Flaky salt)

• ¼ tsp Baking soda

• ⅛ - ¼ tsp Cinnamon (optional)

• 240g Water

• 226g Butter

• 60g Dutch process cocoa

• 135g Buttermilk (or kefir)

• 2 Eggs (about 100g)

• 1 tsp Vanilla extract

For the glaze:

• 113g (1 stick) Butter

• 30g Dutch-process cocoa

• 330g Confectioner’s sugar, sifted

• 60g Buttermilk

• 1 tsp Vanilla extract

• ¼ tsp Kosher salt (sub flaky salt)

Method

• For the Pecans: Preheat the oven to 300°F / 148°C (low fan).

• Combine the sugar, corn syrup, honey, salt, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Add in the pecans and stir together (the mixture will be very sticky, but do the best you can to get the pecans evenly coated).

• Spread the mixture on a silpat and toast, stirring every five minutes or so, for 18-24 minutes, or until the pecans are deeply toasted and the sugary coating has formed an even, crystalline coating on the pecans. They won’t be crunchy fresh out of the oven, but will crisp up as they cool. If they’re still a bit tacky when cool, toast them for another five minutes or so. A note: this process may be faster in a convection oven.

• For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350°F / 176°C (low fan) / 160°C (fan). Grease and line a 9” x 13” inch brownie pan with parchment paper.

• In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, light brown sugar, granulated sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda.

• In a medium non-reactive pot, warm the water and butter until the butter has melted and the mixture has just come to a simmer. Whisk in the cocoa until it is fully dissolved. Let cool slightly. Tip the cocoa mixture into the flour mixture and whisk until smooth. Add the buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla and whisk again until the mixture is fully combined.

• Scrape into the prepared pan and bake for 28-30 minutes, or until the cake springs back to the touch [Editor’s Note: I am in the UK and it took closer to 35 minutes in my oven at 160°C fan] and has just begun to separate from the sides of the pan. If a skewer or toothpick is inserted into the middle of the cake, it will return with just a few moist crumbs and no wet batter – this will really depend on your oven, so check the cues rather than relying only on the timer.

• For the Glaze: While the cake is baking, melt the butter in a medium non-reactive pot. Whisk in the cocoa until fully dissolved. Add the confectioner’s sugar and buttermilk and whisk until smooth. Stir in the vanilla and salt, then taste and add a pinch more salt as needed.

• When the cake comes out of the oven, immediately scrape the glaze over the cake. Using an offset spatula, spread it into an even layer over the cake. Let the glaze set for five minutes before sprinkling the candied pecans in an even layer over the surface. Let the cake cool to just-warm room temperature before serving. The cake keeps excellently at room temperature for up to four days