This past week was a covered dish dinner at our church. I don’t know about the rest of the churches, but the food is always great and plentiful at one of our dinners. My personal thought is: who better to experiment on then your church friends? With this in mind I made a new chocolate cake recipe called “Decadently delicious chocolate cake. It was really good and also really easy. However, it does make a huge cake. Maybe you would like to try it for your “Super Bowl Sunday” friends.

Did you know that chocolate is from the Cacao tree, originally discovered by the Olmecs and Mays of ancient America. The tree grows large ponds on it trunk and largest branches. These pods contain seeds (beans) and are fermented, dried, roasted and ground to make chocolate.
The Aztecs could not grow cacao in their high mountain valleys so the taxed the lowland tribes for a yearly sum of 980 loads of cacao beans with 24,000 counted-out beans in each load. They used these beans for money and to make a drink which only the nobility sipped.
Cacao beans ere only used for a drink until a Dutch chemist vanHouten, invented a machine that removed two-thirds of the fat to form cocoa powder.

In 1820 Walter Baker manufactured new chocolate products using this invention. Baking chocolate, as it is called today, is chocolate in its purest form - with nothing added or taken away. Three cheers for the Aztecs!!!

Decadently Delicious Chocolate Cake

4 eggs 1 pkg chocolate cake mix
1 cup sour cream 1 pkg chocolate instant pudding
½ cup water 12 oz semisweet chocolate chips
½ cup oil confectioner’s sugar

Beat eggs, sour cream, water, and oil together in a large bowl. Add cake mix and pudding mix. Beat until smooth. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour into a greased large bundt or tube pan and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Cool in pan for 10 minutes then remove to rack to finish cooling. When cool, sift powdered sugar on top of cake.