Grandma Hudgin's Chocolate Cake Origins

Ever since I can remember, my mother always baked me a special, moist, rich, whole wheat, delicious chocolate cake for my birthday. She made it in different shapes, like a seashell, a cat, a rainbow, a flower garden, or one time she even laid fresh lilac blossoms on top - apparently they are edible, but we didn't eat them.

Now it's a favorite recipe in my own household - see some we've baked: a teal cake, a pink rectangular cake, a pink round cake, and a chocolate-peanut butter icing covered cake. I usually make it for my daughter Emily's birthday, and at other times in the year, too, whenever we want a really easy, quick, yummy chocolate cake.

Recently, an email conversation between my close friend from childhood and Emily inspired me to track down the origins of this now-traditional cake, known to me as Grandma Hudgins Chocolate Cake.

So I asked my mother, and she told me she got it from my older brother's former guitar teacher, and that she herself had no idea who Grandma Hudgins was.

Then I asked my former youth group leader from when I was in high school if he had known this lady, and he pointed me to a website with the guitar teacher's email address, and I wrote her email. She wrote me back the same day!

And that's how I found out that it's actually Grandma Hudgin without an S, and so there should be an apostrophe in the recipe title. And she actually knows the person from the recipe title! Wow. I wasn't actually expecting to get to the bottom of the mystery so easily! The internet is such a wonderful research tool! And keeping up long-term relationships is too!

So now my children can say that our family chocolate cake is from their mother's elder brother's former guitar teacher's elder sister's best friend from high school's grandmother. Simple.