Mayonnaise cake マヨネーズケーキ

This is a very moist and chocolaty cake and the ingredients include a surprising item--mayonnaise!. This is a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe that my wife got, from a neighbor on a recent visit to the town in Pennsylvania where she grew up. Many Pennsylvania Dutch cakes and pies are unique and a bit unusual. My wife loves collecting these old recipes as nostalgia for tastes of her childhood and admiration for the creativity of the cooks who invented them. My wife made a few of them such as crumb cake, wacky cake, shoofly pie and funny cake. But, as far as I am concerned, the mayo cake is the most unusual. My wife also admitted that she never had this cake before. It came together very quickly and it was really good. If you happened to be a "mayoler*" マヨラー, this is a "must" recipe.

*"Mayo-ler" is a Japanglish word meaning "somebody-who-really-(really)-likes-mayonnaise". Apparently mayonnaise is quite the craze in Japan. We have seen TV reviews of restaurants in Japan for Mayolers in which all items are made with mayo even including mayo drinks! While we certainly appreciate mayo as a condiment on sandwiches or in salad dressing we have never gone to one of these restaurants. (And in all honesty, since we are not that crazy about mayonnaise, I doubt we ever will).

This is a small serving and, just for pics, we decorated it with whipped cream and Maraschino cherry.

Ingredients:
Dry:
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
5 tbs. Hershey's cocoa (being a PA dutch recipe, it has to be Hershey's chocolate of course).

Wet:
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup hot water

Directions:
Sift dry ingredients together 3 times (#1). combine the mayo and water until smooth (#2).  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until incorporated (#3 and #4). bake in a greased 13 X 9 inch pan at 350 degrees for about 25-30 minutes (#5 and #6).

It doesn't get any easier than this. This cake is lusciously moist and chocolaty. Truly amazing!!  Oh! I just realized we did not post shoo-fly pie, wacky cake or funny cake. Maybe, my wife would like to make these so that we can post them (hint, hint).