Great find, Martha! I remember the old Hershey's syrup cake, barely.

Chocolate cake is problematic. If you're using a high fat, very dark cocoa powder, like Valrhona, you can just put the cocoa powder in cake batter and you'll get a rich chocolate, though it might not taste as chocolaty as you could want. With ordinary cocoa powder, whether Hershey's, Trader Joe's fancy, Ghirardelli, etc., coaxing out the chocolatiness is harder. That's one reason so many people resort to Duncan Hines mix for chocolate cake! There are two basic home recipes that I think were disseminated by Hershey's: The hot water with cocoa powder and the chocolate syrup. Many recipes are based on those because they work. Ina has you make the "syrup". There's one on the web which I like which uses the hot water as well as espresso powder, which is super when I sub in Valrhona. There are a few others that have you melt and temper baking chocolate, more pastry cheffy recipes, which are good, but a big bother if you just want a basic chocolate cake.

I bake our family's favorite chocolate birthday cake using Droste's cocoa powder and it has been the family favorite for 45 years. I tried it once with Hershey's cocoa, and it was a great disappointment. I will have to try this recipe.

My favorite is still the one on the back of the Hershey's cocoa box, the one with boiling water. I also add a teaspoonful or so of espresso powder, I like that little bit of flavor it gives. I usually use Hershey's cocoa because that's what my small community has available, along with Nestle. I have taken to buying the "Special Dark" cocoa, because I like that better. I used to get Rodelle at Costco, but I no longer have a membership. Since I only managed to get there a single time in 14 months, a membership was not cost effective! I could buy it on line but do I remember? Nope, not until I want it....

I think the duplication of recipes happens often. I know a member here a long time ago posted a cookie recipe that was "adapted" from a famous chef. Word for word, it was the cookie recipe from my 1969 Betty Crocker cookbook, LOL. So much for famous chefs.

Annie

Whoa! Word for word? Maybe the publishers get permissions. I won't even call a recipe "mine" amongst friends unless I've made significant changes to it. To the recipe, not just the words. I wonder if these chefs have had the recipes copied out into their files for so long that they've forgotten they came from books?

Shielajoyce, it's the Droste's cocoa not the recipe. Valrhona is easier for me to get, especially in bulk, but Droste is my all time favorite.

Well, not "word for word" but "ingredient for ingredient" -- one major change was one CAN of syrup (Ina's) -- 1 cup in this recipe. I guess why I posted was because I always thought of it as an Ina original recipe -- I'd never seen it before and lo and behold here it is in a midwestern cookbook from the 70s

What does "Ina's recipe" really mean though, beyond that you got it from her cookbook? For me it means that it's a recipe coming to me from a source (Ina) that I find generally reliable, and not much more. Unless she adds some accompanying comments, I have no thoughts or expectations as to whether it's a recipe she actually developed, or a team of chefs developed for her, or that her mom passed down to her on a scrap of paper and who knows where it came from before that. There's not much copyrightable about recipes. From copyright.gov:

Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.

FOAS, that's why I questioned word for word. That turns out not to be the case.

I think Martha's point was that this is an old, tried and true recipe, widely distributed, and here is fancy dancy chef Ina Garten giving it out as if it were something new. A few words saying something like "this classic cake is easy to make and has a lovely chocolate flavor that is sometimes hard to achieve at home," would be a clue. And maybe there were some introductory comment of that kind that was cut or detached or something.

My expectation when I read the first post was that the chocolate ganache in Ina's recipe was a ganache in lieu of the syrup, silly me. :)

Decades ago, 3 local women published a hugely popular cookbook, Muffin Mania. I got really ticked when I read a blog of a young woman purporting her banana muffins to be the best, and comments agreed, and it is the recipe out of Muffin Mania, word for word. I wrote on her blog and called her out on it. That really pi**es me off.

Well as noted, there's no ganache in the original. Per the recipe I found online there's also no baking powder, salt, or almond extract in Ina's, twice as much chocolate syrup and three times as much vanilla.

So the basic ratios of fat, sugar, flour and eggs are the same. And the idea of having chocolate syrup in it. Ends about there, as far as I'm concerned.

Oh. Thanks FOAS.

Jasdip, I get you. How hard is it to say, "My banana muffins, from Muffin Mania, are the best," instead. And write up your own directions so as not to violate copyright.