This week I made a chocolate mayonnaise cake.

That’s right. A chocolate MAYONNAISE cake. It’s a vintage recipe that sounds exceptionally gross, and yet, is totally NOT! It results in a delightfully moist and tender cake, with just a hint of tang. Sounds insane. It isn’t.

Much like my life. (Ba-dum ting!)

Several months ago I wrote a post about making a peach coffee cake that held a lot of bittersweet memories for me. This cake recipe similarly comes with something of a sad story. (This is me we’re talking about. Of course it comes with a story. Everything does. It’s a hallmark of my personality at this point.)

In my mid-twenties, I was in a dead-end relationship with a man who was more than twice my age. Let’s call him…Ted. Oh, Ted…the dude had been through the wringer, was not in a good place in his life mentally or logistically, and both of us were rather touch-starved as well as feeling disillusioned by the notion that we would ever find someone to spend our lives with. If anything, it was a friendship of mutual benefit and convenience that eventually went too far, and indeed, it went too far for far longer than it should have. It was functional dysfunction for awhile. Honestly…the man needed love, and I was still far too much of a giver at the time to recognize all the things wrong with the situation. I eventually broke it off, and thank goodness, because I met my now husband shortly afterward!

There were many notable features in this saga with Ted that I could share, but it’s akin to gossip and not really relevant at the moment. What is relevant to this post is that about a month or so into my relationship with him, Ted’s birthday was coming up. If you’ve ever not been in the greatest place mentally, you know that things like birthdays can be a source of real sadness and pain rather than something one looks forward to, and that was the case for Ted. I wanted to do something really kind for him, and my default approach in that vein is to cook or bake. So, I asked him what he would want for his birthday, and he told me…

You guessed it. Chocolate mayonnaise cake.

Like I said – this is a vintage recipe, and I was shacking up with an older guy. Apparently this was the birthday cake his mom would make him every year when he was young. Having never heard of it before now, I absolutely made the same cringey faces you’re likely making about it – but I was a gal on a mission. So, thanking the modern marvel that is Google, I found a recipe on the internet and gave it my best shot. Lo and behold! Excellent chocolate cake, and (for once, momentarily) happy Ted.

Some months later it all went to heck, and I haven’t made the cake since, until this week.

Mmmm, chocolate mayonnaise cake – moist, fudgy, with the unmistakable tang of an emotionally unavailable boyfriend.

I kid, I kid. Sorta. Still, similarly to the peach coffee cake, as great a recipe as this chocolate mayonnaise cake is, it lives in a particularly peculiar, shadowy, Tim Burton-esque corner of my heart that I tend to avoid. Of course, in the interest of properly healing all parts of myself, avoidance isn’t the name of my game anymore. So when I found myself with a surplus of mayo on hand, I decided to take this cake recipe out for a spin again, for the first time in many years.

I know, I know – who finds themselves with extra mayo and thinks, “oh, I’ll make a cake with this!”, right? But it works, I swear! And I say it tastes just that much better without the unhealthy relationship. Give it a try – the cake, that is.