How to make a chocolate cake out of damn near anything

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up not far from a sauerkraut factory, and that meant contests at the county fair to see who could stuff sauerkraut into the most unusual recipes. I'm not surprised to find it on a baked potato or in chocolate cake, for example.

The modestly-named A Collection of the Very Finest Recipes Ever Assembled into One Cookbook Conventional and Microwave (1979) apparently had such jaded readers in mind. If a sauerkraut chocolate cake (Mmmm! Stringy!) seems too common, how about this?

This is the kind of dessert that could make one stick to a New Year's resolution to skip sweets. Sauerkraut, beer, and raisins with chocolate, anyone? (And is it weird that I am more troubled by the raisins in a chocolate cake than I am by the beer? The chewy little blobs that taste like something that's been in the back of the cupboard for WAY too long have never had much appeal to me. If it says anything, my grandpa used to get me to eat raisin bran by saying it was full of dead bugs. I liked the idea of dead bugs better than the idea of raisins.)

(Hey! I have a new idea for a chocolate cake ingredient.  Bet you can't guess what it is....)