This Old-School Trick For Super Moist Chocolate Cake Sounds Weird But Tastes Delicious

Imagine the dreamiest chocolate show-stopper ever to emerge from an earthly oven. It's stacked sky-high with fat layers of rich, gooey frosting, sprinkled with a flurry of crunchy chocolate jimmies. Every inch of it begs you to carve your fork through its luscious surface for a mouthful of that devastatingly sweet and succulent cocoa. Got it? Now picture that, but with a potato. Welcome to history's favorite way to nail a super moist chocolate cake: mashed potatoes.

For the record, we're not talking about the garlic, parm, and mascarpone kind you will be buried with someday (Okay, maybe that's just my dream). This old-school cake booster requires silky-soft, unadulterated mashed potatoes (or plain flakes — we're not monsters). A cup of no-lump mashed potatoes added to a scratch-made cake lends structure and bounce to the sponge for a tender, melt-in-your-mouth bite.

Wait, so why did mashed potatoes become a baking thing? Maybe you've noticed this while drowning your holiday dinner in gravy, but the fibrous starch in potatoes holds onto moisture like its life depends on it, creating an ultra moist cake without all the density that egg yolks, oil, bananas, or pumpkin might bring. Still, while we'll happily heap a helping of buttery mashed potatoes on our plates, we sure don't want our dessert to be tasting of tuber. Luckily, potato flavor becomes a distant memory thanks to chocolate potato cake recipes that add all kinds of sugar, spices, and cocoa powder to the mix. It's potato science, and it's delicious — just like baking, itself.

Just like the invention of retro rainbow Jell-O recipes, comforting classic family sized casseroles and loaves, and Martha Stewart's onion sandwich of her youth, mashed potatoes slid off the dining table and entered the baking chat as a matter of necessity, back when resources were slim. No flour in the cupboard? (And no Instacart?) Gather your nearest russets.

If you lived through WWI, The Great Depression, or WWII, you probably ate chocolate cake with mashed potatoes in it. But even earlier, in the 1800s, resourceful Swedes made potato and almond kronans kaka (crown's cake) using ingredients they ate every day. While there are plenty of vintage recipes doing loops around the internet — for everything from 1960s mashed potato brownies to 1930s mashed potato donuts — you'll find some newer recipes putting a spin on timeless favorites. While you'd be hard-pressed to lock in the original inventor of sweet potatoes as bread (It was coming from everywhere around the globe, almost all at once), these days, sweet potato bread often celebrates its Southern roots, using pecans, cinnamon, and mashed sweet potatoes to serve ultra-moist, loaf-shaped comfort.

I first tasted sugary mashed potatoes when my mom made old-timey mashed potato candy in the '90s — almost a hundred years after it was popular. Picture a Little Debbie Swiss Roll, except replace the chocolate and cake with mashed potatoes, and swap the cream filling for peanut butter. Despite featuring nearly a ton of confectioner's sugar (almost), I couldn't wrap my kid-sized brain around dinner as candy. Now, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss mashed potatoes as dessert — especially in the chocolate potato cake of the century.