EBINGERS Brooklyn Blackout Cake Recipe Link [moved from SF Bay Area board]

For those interested in this midnight moist, deep and dark layer cake with "deadly" delicious Chocolate pudding-like frosting...and chocolate cake crumb topping, the Link from Gale Gand (the Chef/Host of "Sweet Dreams" on Foodtv) is below.

Link: http://www.foodtv.com/foodtv/recipe/0...

there's a thread below on the wonderful Ebinger's cake from my childhood growing up in Park Slope. Gale Gand's is slightly different - a little more cocoa, but still uses the (dreadful) vegetable shortening as in the link below, however. all the other ingredients are the same, in the same quantities, however the custard is completely different. I've been dying to try out the recipe - it's easily been 25 years since having had a bite of that cake.
If anyone has tried out any of the recipes, I'd love to know the results of either.
ps, I've never tried copying a link - sorry if it doesn't work in advance. In any case it's Nancy Berry's reply that has the link (in the bagel link below)
Liz

Link: http://www.jewishfood-list.com/recipe...

Interesting parallels--in The Brooklyn Cookbook (Knopf, 1991), the cake part of the recipe is identical to the one in Derek's link, and the custard and frosting matches the one in liz's link!

I made it once, and it was pretty good... but not the cake of memory.

That's the one I've tried, and it was not the same. It's different from the original which did not have 2 fillings... only one, which was a pudding. Gand said that the addition of the shortening helped the pudding set better than butter alone.

I don't think it's two fillings: one's filling and the other is frosting...and the shortening isn't in the pudding, it's in the cake, which is not better off with the addition of shortening...ever in anything, except maybe some pie crusts, but even at that lard beats all.
Liz

Shortening isn't really better in this cake, but it probably makes it more like the one Ebinger's used. They probably used a soft wheat bleached cake flour in this cake, also. I once talked to Rose Levy Berenbaum, the author of some wonderful baking books, at a food show in SF and asked her what type of flour she'd suggest for tender crumb (like this cake) cakes, and she said that bleached cake flour like Swans Down or Softasilk or King Arthur's Queen Guinevere Cake Flour (this flour is the only bleached flour King Arthur sells -- they say that bleaching is necessary to get the proper PH for a tender crumb)is absolutely essential for this type of cake and that a low protein all-purpose flour like White Lily is only a weak substitute.

The type of flour that you use in this particular cake really makes a difference. It will not approach Ebinger's wonderful texture if you use all-purpose flour or unbleached pastry flour.