Chocolate cake from top to bottom, all around and in between!
It’s easy for me to overlook offerings like this—we’ve been making the Hunka Burnin’ Love Chocolate Cake for so long, I start to take it for granted! But watching an eight-year-old devour a big slice of it the other day reminded me just how tasty and terrific this long-time Zingerman’s classic really is!
In fact, the look in the eyes of any chocolate lover who eats this cake will probably say far more than I can in words. Poet Theodore Roethke once said that, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” His comment has inspired me to use this cake to train my eye to look more carefully and more closely at the nuance. In this case, it would be, “With a slice of very dark chocolate cake, the eye begins to see.” The layers, the different shades of lovely light browns, through to dark, almost black, cake. The creamy visual texture of the frosting that gracefully surrounds the cake. Hunka Burnin’ Love Cake is not a pastry that can be passed by lightly. It’s big in size, big in flavor, strikingly significant, marvelously memorable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone eat this and not comment! Their eyes open wide just at the sight of it, and then their heads tend to shake slowly from side to side as they eat.
Irish philosopher John O’Donohue wrote that, “The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere—in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves.” And, clearly, in high-quality cake! And, O’Donohue added, “When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.” Eating this cake is indeed a bit like coming home. Even if your mom—like mine—didn’t really bake, this could be the cake that takes you to the part of “home” you heard about from others, but never really had. Pair it with a glass of really cold Calder Dairy milk at Zingerman’s Next Door Café.
