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Chocolate cake August 26, 2014

August 1, 2014

One of the foods I miss most at Palo Verde (maybe even more than ice cream) is chocolate. Last year, there was some for sale in the gift shop, but there isn’t any this year. Sometimes when people come into the station, they bring some with them—a faculty member on one of the courses brought some, and my field assistant brought little chocolate foot(soccer)balls when she came back from Nicaragua. But otherwise, chocolate has been as rare as rain.

I’m not the only person craving a chocolate fix. A few weeks ago, when dessert was a yellow cake frosted with dolce de leche, someone asked the cook about making a chocolate cake. The suggestion was unanimously endorsed, but I wasn’t sure if chocolate cake would actually happen.

So I was pretty excited when I arrived at lunch and saw a two-layer chocolate cake sitting on the table. I’m happy to report that it more than met our expectations. Objectively speaking, it’s not the most chocoholic cake I’ve ever had—it tastes almost like red velvet cake, so I think the cook used cocoa but not chocolate in the batter. But it’s still the most, and most concentrated, chocolate I’ve had in months. And there’s some left for dinner.