The Plan

   Could chocolate cake ever make life less joyful?  Not likely, so the plan will be to try a few new recipes to generate bliss and to lighten things up a little within reasonable parameters.  I will make chocolate cake and share it with people, and those people will enjoy the cake.  There will be rules.  1) Odd outlier-type confections  count as cake - like a brownie or maybe an occasional cookie or cheesecake.  If it's cake to me, then it's cake.  2) Cakes have to be doable with equipment presently in the house, and no stocking up on stuff and gadgets.  The 30-year-old Whirlpool electric oven that came with the house will have to do, and so will the hodgepodge of assorted baking pans already in the kitchen.  Fortunately there is an outstanding state of the art KitchenAid standing mixer, far superior to the oven.  Then there are guiding thoughts that aren't exactly rules.  Recipes will be tried in my kitchen at 8,000 feet elevation.  First try on each recipe will be as close to the exact author's instructions as possible, without altitude adjustments, at least at first.  I have not written and probably never will write a recipe but can sometimes alter, tweak, screw up or revise an existing one. When true creators of recipes are known, I will certainly give them credit. Chocolate cake recipes from anywhere can be tried, but the first ones will come from Michelle Urvater's Chocolate Cake, which I'll use as long as the library lets me. Finally, I plan to have big fun baking these cakes for 100 not necessarily consecutive days and to blog them in more or less chronological order unless the plan changes.

The Start

   On a damp February evening I stopped by my neighborhood library to bring back a late movie.  Exhausted, cold and in no mood to browse, I approached the counter to make my return.  Alone on that counter sat a large and beautiful, possibly life-changing book: Chocolate Cake, 150 Recipes from the Simple to the Sublime by Michelle Urvater. 
   "150 chocolate cakes," I marvelled. 
   "Please, take it," responded  our librarian.  "The shelf where it goes is full, and we really have no place for it." 
   How could I not?
   What's more fun than chocolate cake, and who needed fun more than I, here almost at the end of a particularly dark winter? I checked out the book, took it  home and began to plan.