The Mississippi Mud Cake Is A Chocolate Lover's Dream Come True

For many sweet-treat lovers, choosing a favorite dessert is often a difficult task. Yet most can agree that any confection with the smooth and creamy addition of chocolate can usually satisfy even the most relentless sweet tooth. Apart from your usual enjoyment of homemade chocolate chip cookies, if making an ultimate chocolate cake is also one of your favorite pastimes, why not upgrade your standard dessert of choice to a Mississippi mud cake?

If you're unfamiliar, Mississippi mud cake is a simple chocolate cake baked in a rectangular sheet or baking pan and covered in marshmallows or marshmallow fluff, chopped nuts, and finished off with a smooth layer of chocolate frosting. 

What makes this dessert perfect for chocolate fans is not just the addition of rich cocoa powder in the cake's batter, but the homemade chocolate frosting that's added atop those slightly melted marshmallows and crunchy nuts. After the frosting has set, you're left with a rich chocolate cake filled with many tantalizing textures and sweet flavors. There are different variations of this iconic classic, and many ways you can make this dessert even more delicious. But first: Here's some history of the Mississippi mud cake, and the origins of its unusual name.

Before you push aside your granda's German chocolate pie for a homemade Mississippi mud cake, you might be curious to know how this decadent, multi-layered treat came to be. In actuality, there are many different theories as to how this chocolate lovers' dessert originated. The oldest theory dates back to 1927 when one Greenville, Mississippi resident survived the flooding of the state's great river and compared a local pie's appearance to the mud that resulted from the flood. Others claim the dessert gained traction and popularity only after World War II when families were looking to make desserts that had easy-to-find ingredients.

Nevertheless, there are examples of Mississippi residents existing in the food space and still not knowing about this elusive dessert until way after its conception. Food author Craig Claiborne grew up alongside the Mississippi River, yet he didn't learn about this state-specific desert until he moved to Manhattan. 

In 1987 he published a basic, traditional Mississippi mud pie recipe — a relative of the mud cake — in his book, "Southern Cooking." While it doesn't contain the noteworthy nuts or melted marshmallows of a mud cake, it still results in a gooey, chocolatey consistency similar to the thick mud your toes would find along the bottom of the Mississippi River. Claiborne's recipe also contains zero flour, making his version of this iconic dessert resemble an extra soft brownie. Speaking of Mississippi mud variations, there's more than one way to make this decadent American confection.

What makes Mississippi mud cake such a unique dessert is that there isn't just one way to make this chocolate-based treat. In Janet A. Hale's "Our Fifty States," the author references the first semblance of a Mississippi mud dessert with a recipe that mirrors your favorite ice cream pie. 

Coffee ice cream aside, there are many different methods of making this fudgy treat with some of the more popular recipes today containing the contrasting flavors and textures of chopped pecans and miniature marshmallows. No one can exactly pinpoint when the addition of nuts and marshmallows came about, but chocolate fans are more than willing to embrace these textured additions between layers of moist chocolate cake and rich chocolate frosting.

If you're a home baker looking to save time when you can, brownie mix is a good substitution for the base of Mississippi mud cake since brownies' moist and chewy texture resembles the consistency of a classic mud cake. If you're making this dessert to satisfy your chocolate craving, why not take things one step further and add crushed Oreos and melted butter as an added base or add crushed cookies atop that melted layer of marshmallows? Whichever way you decide to make this state-specific dessert, Mississippi mud cake's gooey brownie-like consistency is sure to satisfy all your chocolate desires.