Pioneer Woman's Chocolate Sheet Cake

(This recipe was first posted in conjunction with the Meijer Ad Week of 4/1/12 - 4/7/12)

The good-quality cocoa powder is on sale this week.  So is real butter.  And powdered sugar.  So what's a chocolate-loving girl to do but make The Best Chocolate Sheet Cake.  Ever.?  The ingredients for this humongous cake are basic, but the combination of those ingredients is delicious!  Two years ago, this was the first recipe I tried from the Pioneer Woman, and I was suitably impressed.  This cake definitely lives up to its name!  I won't lie and say it comes together in a snap, because there are quite a few steps involved (most notably, cooking two different buttery chocolate mixtures on the stovetop).  But the melt-in-your-mouth result makes it all worth it! 

So go ahead, find the recipe here:

The Best Chocolate Sheet Cake.  Ever.

Then make the cake...and let me know how many pieces you ate in one sitting!  I'm curious if anyone can top my ___ pieces the first time I made this cake :)  You can read Ree's entertaining (albeit sometimes irreverent) description of how to make the cake, or scroll all the way to the bottom to find a recipe-card version of the recipe.

Options and Tips

• This recipe calls for 1/2 cup of buttermilk.  Just cheat as follows to save yourself some cash:  put 1/2 Tbsp vinegar into a 1/2 cup measuring cup.  Fill to the top with milk.  Ta da!  Buttermilk!
• Use real butter for this recipe!  Margarine just doesn't cut it for this one, sorry!
• Speaking of "not cutting it", I buy quite a few things from Aldi, but their cocoa powder is not recommended for this recipe...it's just not chocolatey enough.
• Ree's recipe says to mix chopped pecans into the frosting, or to just leave them out if you don't care for nuts.  My problem with this is that my husband REALLY likes pecans, but my kids REALLY do not.  So instead of mixing the pecans into the frosting, I sprinkled them on top of half of the cake immediately after it came out of the oven, and then poured the frosting (minus the pecans) over the whole thing.