American Cake - Cake #22: Hershey Bar Cake

Time Period: 1946 - 1962

Though a lot of the cakes in this project have main ingredients that are not native to America, there's no denying the origin of Hershey's chocolate. Milton Hershey apprenticed with a Philadelphia confectioner when he was a teenager, and there was no looking back. He built his company on the ideal of making chocolate affordable, and between that, stamping the name of his product right into the chocolate itself, and providing it as rations to wartime soldiers, it's little wonder that Hershey's became a national phenomenon.

This cake, which derives all of its chocolate from Hershey's products (no cocoa powder) first appeared in the 1950s. At the time, it contained more sugar, which was later reduced in place of Hershey's syrup to infuse even more chocolate into it. Some recipes even ask for more drizzled on top, but that seems like overkill.

Today, it's become very fashionable to bag on Hershey's for being mass-produced, processed, "fake" chocolate. To some extent, I get it. There are certain ingredients I want to be as pure and natural as possible, and I enjoy more thoughtfully-sourced chocolate of varying levels of darkness as much as the next guy. That said, I don't have any beef with Hershey's. Though I don't have much of a sweet tooth, when I do get the craving for candy, there's nothing wrong with a good ol' fashioned Hershey bar, and hey, if it's Mr. Goodbar, even better.

While Hershey's has now mostly been relegated to bite-sized candy to give out at Halloween, this cake wasn't bad. Would it replace traditional chocolate cake in any serious baker's cookbook? No, of course not. But much like the chocolate bars themselves, it was a perfectly serviceable dessert.