Chocolate Potato Cake

No, you didn’t read the title wrong. This is a chocolate cake that features potatoes as a main ingredient. In my great-grandma Cora’s recipe book, it’s actually just titled “Potato Cake,” but I figured that was a little misleading for a couple of reasons: 1. chocolate plays heavily into the flavor profile here; and 2. “potato cake” kept getting confused with “potato pancake” here in my household when I said I’d be making it, and let me clarify that those two things are not at all the same.

Initial thoughts on the recipe

When I first saw this, I thought it would be another sort of “hard times” cake — you know, ingredients are in short supply, so let’s use some mashed potatoes to help fill in the gaps!

But no. That is not this recipe.

In fact, I was trying to make this for a week before I kept rediscovering the ingredient list and realizing there was something else in the cake I forgot and needed to buy before I could make it. Like cocoa powder (which is what I’m assuming “chocolate dry” means). And then it includes pretty much all the typical dessert spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and clove. I had to make sure I had all those on hand just in case. And then to top it off, I almost forgot about the cup of chopped nuts. Thankfully, the recipe doesn’t specify what kind of nuts, so the leftover slivered almonds I had in my cupboard would suffice.

And can we talk about the fact that the potato doesn’t replace some other ingredient like eggs or butter or flour? That’s what I thought this was going to be all about.

To be fair though, I suppose this piqued my interest even more than before, since I couldn’t really figure out what this cake is supposed to be about.

Trying it out

As I was making this recipe, one thing that stood out to me was that the batter is thick. Once everything except the whites and the nuts were added– I decided to add those last based on how these kinds of things generally go — it almost felt like cookie dough, not cake batter. >insert doubt here<

The egg whites helped to moisten things a little more, but this still wasn’t like many cake batters I’ve worked with before. Speaking of the egg whites, this recipe separated them from the yolks and said they should be beaten. While there were no further instructions on just how beaten they should be, I went with the tried and true concept of beating them until soft peaks formed.

Another fun thing about this recipe is that there are no instructions on how to bake it. Even though “quick oven,” “moderate oven,” and the like are fairly vague, it’s still something to work with.

I scoured the internet for 19th century potato cakes to see if someone else had made a similar recipe and wrote down cooking time and oven temperature. Unsurprisingly, nothing was really an exact match. The closest I found was this recipe from Juls’ Kitchen. On closer inspection, though, the recipes have enough differences that I’m not sure they could be easily swapped. In any case, the cooking time and temperature was guessed on that one as well, so I might as well just wing it.

I set the oven to 350 and decided to check on the cake after 25 minutes. It looked like it needed another 15 minutes…then another…then some more time. By the time it passed the toothpick test, it had been about an hour. There may be a better way to do this, but here’s my conclusion: 350 for 1 hour worked.

As for serving, I wasn’t sure exactly how this cake’s texture would end up or how rich it would taste, so I started by sprinkling some powdered sugar over the top. That’s how it’s pictured here. But after tasting it and further considering, this is pretty much like a regular cake and benefits from frosting.

The more you know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The verdict:

So here’s the tea: I think if you make this, you should make a big batch of mashed potatoes and reserve a cup for the cake. Because it feels a little sad to make mashed potatoes just for a cake when mashed potatoes on their own are so good. I would recommend using leftover mashed potatoes, if such a thing is even possible in your household.

Now on to the taste. Honestly, it’s pretty good! Definitely unique. Because of the mix of chocolate and all the spices, it honestly reminds me a bit of German Lebkuchen, a gingerbread-type cookie that often is coated in chocolate. It’s kind of a chocolate spice cake.

It’s definitely dense, though still a texture that benefits from the addition of frosting. I also don’t really think the addition of nuts was entirely necessary, but then again that’s usually my opinion of nuts in baked goods so your mileage may vary.

If I’m going purely on taste, I’d give this about a 4/5. It’s good cake! But honestly I think you could just put the same spices in a much simpler chocolate cake recipe and probably have the same outcome.

Have you made a similar kind of potato cake recipe? Or are you giving this a shot? Let me know in the comments!