Recipes & Food Styling

For Groundhog Day, the perfect chocolate cake to celebrate or ease your frustrations – whatever the prediction might be!

Violets & Groundhogs! Had Grandma not passed away in September, we would be celebrating her 102nd birthday today with her! Around this time in 2014, her recipe for Shadow Cake was featured in the newspapers for Groundhog Day! I made her Shadow Cake to celebrate her birthday and her incredible gift of a very long life!

Groundhogs love violets leaves, so I used my new violet dishes. I ordered them from Replacements Ltd. My mom had the whole set of these dishes, and I adored them!

I made groundhog cut-out cookies and used the cookie cutter to stencil a groundhog “shadow” on the cake with powdered sugar.

Regardless of the outcome on February 2, Groundhog Day is a great time to start thinking about 2021 garden plans! This coming week my mom would already be leafing through her seed catalogs, forcing bulbs to start growing in the sunroom & more! Time to start planning!

Shadow Cake

2 cups light brown sugar

½ cup butter (1 stick)

2 eggs- beat whites and yolks separately

6 cups cocoa in ½ cup boiling water

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour or 2 ½ cups Swans Down cake flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup sour milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream butter and sugar. Add beaten egg yolks, cocoa and cinnamon. Add flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk and vanilla, and fold in the beaten egg whites last. Pour into greased cake pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 or 40 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean.