Preheat oven to 350F, grease two 8″ round baking pans and dust with cocoa powder. Line bottoms with parchment.
Place all dry ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Stir to combine.
In a medium bowl whisk all wet ingredients (pour hot water in slowly as not to cook the eggs).
Add wet ingredients to dry and mix on medium for 2-3 mins. Batter will be very thin*.
Pour evenly into prepared pans. I used a kitchen scale to ensure the batter is evenly distributed.
Bake for 45 mins or until a cake tester comes out mostly clean.
Cool 10 minutes in the pans then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Cherry Liqueur Syrup:
Place sugar and water into a small pot. Stir and bring to a boil. Simmer for 1 min then remove from heat. Stir in cherry liqueur and allow to cool completely.
Whipped Cream Frosting:
Whip cream and powdered sugar until stiff peaks. Ideally in a cold bowl with a cold whisk.
Chocolate Bark:
Melt chocolate over a double boiler or in 20 second bursts in the microwave.
Using a large offset spatula, spread melted chocolate in a thin layer on a large sheet of parchment.
Roll up from the short side of the parchment. Place on a baking sheet and refrigerate or freeze until firm.
Unroll to create chocolate bark.
Assembly:
Cut each cake layer in half horizontally.
Place one layer of cake on a cake stand or serving plate. Brush generously with cherry syrup.
Top with approximately 1 cup whipped cream and spread evenly. Top with approximately 1 cup of cherries and gently press them into the whipped cream. Repeat with remaining layers and frost the outside of the cake.
Decorate with chocolate bark, chocolate shavings, rosettes, and cherries if desired.
By STEPHEN GROVES, AAMER MADHANI and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee requested an investigation Thursday into how Trump national security officials used the Signal app to discuss military strikes and a federal judge said he would order the preservation of the messages, ensuring at least some scrutiny on an episode President Donald Trump has dismissed as frivolous.
Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the committee, and Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat, signed onto a letter to the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense for an inquiry into the potential “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
The senators’ assertion that classified information was potentially shared was notable, especially as Trump’s Republican administration has contended there was no classified information on the Signal chain that had included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine.
Later Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said during a hearing for a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit watchdog, American Oversight, that he’ll issue a temporary restraining order barring administration officials from destroying messages.
Across Washington, the Signal leak presented a major test early in Trump’s second term on the federal government’s system of checks and balances meant to protect national security. Yet even as mechanisms for oversight and investigation sputtered to life, it was a halting effort as most Republicans seemed content to allow the controversy to blow over. Meanwhile, Democrats slammed the Signal chat as a reckless violation of secrecy that could have put service members in harm’s way.
“This put pilots at risk because of sloppiness and carelessness,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and former fighter pilot.
Kelly and other Democrats have called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to either resign or be fired. “If this was an officer in the military — at any level — or enlisted person, they would have been fired already,” Kelly said.
Asked by a reporter Wednesday about the call by Wicker, of Mississippi, and Reed, of Rhode Island, for an investigation, Trump replied, “It doesn’t bother me.”
Classified hearing with administration requested
Wicker, whose support was crucial to Hegseth’s Senate confirmation, is one of the most ardent defense hawks in Congress and has said the committee will request a classified hearing to follow up on the inspector general’s report, as well as for the administration to verify the contents of the Signal chat. The contents, which were published by The Atlantic, show that Hegseth listed weapons systems and a timeline for the attack on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month.
Senate Republicans have criticized the discussion on Signal but have stopped short of calling for the removal of Hegseth or anyone else involved. Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican member of both the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said any oversight should be done “in a bipartisan way.”
Still, Democrats are pressing to probe much deeper. Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wants to check the phones of those involved in the Signal chat for malware as well as whether Hegseth had shared military plans on other Signal chats.
Warner said he expected support from Republicans in calling for such an investigation, but so far Warner’s Republican counterpart on the intelligence committee, Sen. Tom Cotton, has given no sign he would join in those calls.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, which has traditionally handled investigations into the mishandling of classified or sensitive information by both Republican and Democratic administrations, showed that under Trump it would likely stay on the sidelines. When asked at an unrelated news conference what the Justice Department plans to do, Attorney General Pam Bondi deflected, saying the mission was ultimately a success.
Echoing the White House, Bondi also insisted that none of the information shared on Signal was classified, even though officials have provided no evidence that that’s the case. Espionage Act statutes require the safe handling of closely held national defense information even if it’s not marked classified.
Bondi, who has pledged not to play politics with the department, quickly pivoted to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden, who were investigated for allegations that they mishandled classified information but were not charged. Both Democrats were subject to extensive criminal investigations, and the FBI and the Justice Department have long track records of such inquiries.
Trump is unhappy with a lawsuit and the judge overseeing it
In civil court, the lawsuit filed by the group American Oversight against several Trump administration officials and the National Archives and Records Administration alleges they violated federal record-keeping laws.
That only further inflamed Trump’s ire at the judiciary, especially when the case was randomly assigned Wednesday to Boasberg, who was already presiding over a case challenging the deportation of Venezuelan migrants under wartime powers. In that case, the Trump administration just this week invoked the “state secrets” privilege to refuse to share details with the judge about the timing of deportation flights to El Salvador.
Trump early Thursday declared it “disgraceful” that Boasberg had been assigned the case in the Washington court. He added that Boasberg, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, a Democrat, is “Highly Conflicted.” Trump and his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg.
In court Thursday, Boasberg limited his order to messages sent between March 11 and March 15, and a government attorney said the administration already was taking steps to collect and save the messages.
Meanwhile, the White House National Security Council has also said it would investigate the Signal chat. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Thursday that she had no update on the status of that investigation.
“We’ve been incredibly transparent about this entire situation, and we will continue to be,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt is one of three Trump administration officials who face a lawsuit from The Associated Press on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. The AP says the three are punishing the news agency for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP is not following an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
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Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker contributed.
By JEFFREY COLLINS and BRITTANY PETERSON Associated Press
When Nicole Taylor and her family moved to their new home in the South Carolina mountains six months ago, the gorgeous view of Table Rock Mountain was the clincher.
She ended up with a porch-side seat to one of at least a half dozen wildfires in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas, fed by dry conditions and millions of trees that were knocked down by Hurricane Helene in 2024 and began decaying into tinderbox fuel.
Taylor watched this past weekend as smoke started to rise from the ridges across Highway 11 in Pickens County. The smoke got worse Monday, and it was pouring off the mountain Tuesday when she got a text saying she was under a mandatory evacuation.
So far no one has been hurt in the fires, which have burned more than 20 square miles (52 square kilometers) in mostly rugged, remote forests and the popular state park that includes Table Rock Mountain. Only a few dozen structures have been damaged.
But the firefighting is slow work. Sources of water to extinguish the flames are scarce, so crews depend on building fire breaks to try to stop them in their tracks, using bulldozers, excavators and even shovels and saws to strip the land of fuel.
It then becomes a waiting game, making sure embers don’t jump the break and hoping for the winds to die down or — the best relief of all — a long, soaking rain.
The long wait
Hurricane Helene slammed through Pickens County the Friday after Taylor moved into her dream home last September. The hurricane-force winds traveled hundreds of miles inland, smashing entire forests and destroying the electrical grid.
There was more than a week of what she called “prairie life.”
“We we’re like, OK, if we can make it through that, we can make it through anything. Unfortunately fire is one thing we can’t fight.”
This week Taylor decamped to wait the fire out in a hotel room in Greenville with her fiance, two children and their dogs. So far the fire has remained across the highway, but it is still too close for them to be able to go home.
“It’s been an actual whirlwind,” Taylor said of the last several days.
Rain and then fire
Six months ago Eric Young packed up his cats and left his home in Transylvania County, North Carolina, after floods and winds from Helene knocked out power, water and cell service. On Wednesday the fires in nearby South Carolina forced them all out again.
A retired environmental educator who moved there from Long Island a few years ago, he had his car, driveway and crawl space flooded in September.
Now he is at a friend’s home near Charlotte, trying to keep a sense of humor about the absurdity of floodwaters followed so soon by flames.
“I thought it was nirvana here — never get anything but severe thunderstorms, the weather is temperate, very nice,” he said. “I didn’t know I’d be gut-punched twice in six months.”
Fighting the blaze
Forestry officials were worried after all those trees came down during Helene. It’s not just the fuel they create, they also hinder firefighters’ movement.
“It is nearly impossible to get through this stuff. We’ve got about five bulldozers, an excavator and saw crews to open this up and clean this,” Toby Cox, the firefighter in charge of the Table Rock fire, said about a fire break in a video briefing Thursday morning.
Extinguishing wildfires in the Carolinas takes time. A fire near Myrtle Beach that threatened dozens of homes and burned 2.5 square miles (6.5 square kilometers) in early March has been out of the news for nearly four weeks, but it is still just 80% contained and sends smoke billowing over neighborhoods when the wind shifts.
Conditions that favor fire outbreaks
Wildfires are unusual in the Carolinas, but not unheard of. The Great Fire of 1898 burned some 4,700 square miles (12,175 square kilometers) in the two states, an area roughly the size of Connecticut, said David Easterling, the director of the Technical Support Unit at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Spring is typically when blazes happen, according to Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.
This season the Blue Ridge Mountains are dry, having received only about two-thirds of the normal amount of rainfall in the last six months since Hurricane Helene. March has been full of sunny, dry, windy days.
Meanwhile the risk to people and property has increased over the years thanks to a boom in popularity of the mountains as a place to live.
“North Carolina has a lot of homes in the wildland urban interface, or more people living with a higher fire risk,” Dello said.
Any trees downed by Helene that do not burn this year will still be around for future fire seasons.
“All that storm debris will be there for years to come, increasing the fire danger considerably,” Easterling said.
The latest fire updates
The two large fires in South Carolina continued to burn Thursday. The Table Rock fire has consumed 7.1 square miles (18.4 square kilometers), and the one on Persimmon Ridge in Greenville County has burned 2.4 square miles (6.2 square kilometers).
The fires are about 8 miles (13 kilometers) apart, and emergency officials have asked almost everyone living between them to leave as a precaution. The evacuation zone extended into nearby Transylvania County, North Carolina.
In North Carolina at least eight fires were burning in the mountains. The largest — the Black Cove Fire and the Deep Woods Fire in Polk County — were 17% and 30% contained, respectively, after firefighters made more progress. The fires have scorched about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) combined but have barely grown for more than a day.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — A leader among the North Carolina Senate Republicans who resigned this week from the General Assembly is the next chief attorney for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
University Chancellor Lee Roberts announced on Thursday the hiring of outgoing Senate Majority Leader Paul Newton as general counsel and vice chancellor at the UNC system’s flagship campus.
Newton revealed in a Tuesday news release his decision to step down from the Senate effective Wednesday “to pursue an opportunity outside of state government” that wasn’t immediately made public. During his farewell speech Wednesday on the Senate floor, Newton said he learned about a job opening several weeks ago and was offered it only on Monday.
Newton, who received undergraduate and law degrees at UNC-Chapel Hill, is a retired Duke Energy employee and executive who joined the Senate in 2017 and became majority leader after the 2022 elections. He said he is also the father of four UNC-Chapel Hill graduates.
Roberts said Newton, who begins the job April 21, “brings exceptional skills and deep experience in law, business and government to our University” and “is passionate about returning to his alma mater and contributing to our success.”
Republicans in Newton’s Cabarrus County Senate district will pick someone to fill his seat through the end of 2026. Senate Republicans also will meet to pick a new majority leader, which is considered a chief lieutenant to the chamber’s top leader, GOP Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger.
Hi there! Yappy to meet you! I’m Mimi! I’m a nine year old, sweet and active lab/terrier mix and I weigh about 40 pounds. I am missing one eye but that doesn’t slow me down! I’ve been with Second Chance for several months and I really want to find my forever home. I need to live in a house with other dogs and need my new people to keep up with the training my foster family has been doing with me. It’s really helping me become more calm and confident! Although I love being around humans, I am learning to build my confidence so I can be left alone in my crate when needed. I like kids, too! Even though I’m nine, I am very active and have plenty of energy. I will do my best in a home that continues to support my training, particularly with crate training, so that I can remain calm and confident when I’m left alone. My crate training is an essential part of my continued growth, so it’s important to view it not as punishment but as a helpful tool to teach me to relax, stay out of trouble, and prevent accidents. If you’re willing to give me the love, consistency and extra patience I need, I could be an incredible companion!
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¼ cup Extra virgin olive Oil (Spanish EVOO if you have it)
1 Onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced (I like to use ½ red and ½ green)
4 cloves Garlic
3 roma tomatoes, very finely diced (or 8 oz. tomato sauce)
Bay leaf
1 teaspoon paprika, sweet or smoked
1 pinch saffron threads
Salt and pepper
¼ cup white wine
4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into pieces*
¼ cup fresh chopped parsley chopped, divided
2 cups Spanish Rice
5 cups Chicken Broth
½ cup frozen peas
½ lb Jumbo Shrimp or prawns, about 12 – peeled, tail on
½ lb Mussels (about 10-12), cleaned properly (beards off)
8 oz calamari rings
Lemons, for garnish
Directions
Add olive oil to a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, bell peppers and garlic and cook until onion is translucent. Add chopped tomato, bay leaf, paprika, saffron salt and pepper. Stir and cook for 5 minutes. Add white wine and cook for 10 minutes. Taste and add salt if needed.
Add chicken pieces, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley and rice to the pot. Cook for 1 minute.
Pour the broth slowly all around the pan and jiggle the pan to get the rice into an even layer. (Do not stir the mixture going forward!).
Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low. Give the pan a gentle shake back and forth just once or twice during cooking. (We don’t ever stir the rice, so that a crispy crust forms at the bottom, called a socarrat).
Cook for about 15-18 minutes (uncovered), then nestle the shrimp, mussels and calamari into the mixture, sprinkle peas on top and continue to cook (without stirring) for about 5 more minutes. Watch for most of the liquid to be absorbed and the rice at the top nearly tender. (If for some reason your rice is still not cooked, add ¼ cup more water or broth and continue cooking).
Remove pan from heat and cover pan with a lid or tinfoil. Place a kitchen towel over the lid and allow to rest for 10 minutes.
Garnish with fresh parsley and lemon slices. Serve.
By JESSE BEDAYN Associated Press/Report for America
DENVER (AP) — As Americans struggle under backbreaking rental prices, builders are turning to innovative ways to churn out more housing, from 3D printing to assembling homes in an indoor factory to using hemp — yes, the marijuana cousin — to make building blocks for walls.
“There’s not enough homes to purchase and there’s not enough places to rent. Period,” said Adrianne Todman, the acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under former President Joe Biden.
Businesses and lawmakers are trying to address the U.S. affordable housing crisis by turning to alternative ways to build homes. These include 3D printing houses out of concrete, building homes in a factory and shipping them to their final destination, and even using the hemp plant in construction. (AP video shot by Thomas Peipert)
One way to quickly build more is embrace these types of innovations, Todman said. “I can only imagine what our housing situation would be like now if we could have made a decision to be more aggressive in adopting this type of housing” decades ago.
So what are these new ways of building homes? And can they help reduce the cost of new housing, leading to lower rents?
Factory-built housing put together in a week
In a cavernous, metal hall, Eric Schaefer stood in front of a long row of modular homes that moved through the plant, similar to a car on an assembly line.
At a series of stations, workers lay flooring, erected framing, added roofs and screwed on drywall. Everything from electrical wiring to plumbing to kitchen countertops were in place before the homes were shrink-wrapped and ready to be shipped.
The business in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Fading West, has pumped out more than 500 homes in its just over three years of operation, each taking just five to seven days to build, even in the coldest winter months, Schaefer said.
Once assembled in the plant, the narrow townhouse-style homes with white trim, balconies and front porches, are about 90% done. At their final destination they are move-in ready within six weeks, Schaefer said.
The company works with towns, counties and housing nonprofits to help address the shortage of affordable homes, mostly for workers who’ve been squeezed out by sky-high prices in ritzy mountain towns.
That includes Eagle, Colorado, not far from the Vail ski resort, where Fading West worked with Habitat for Humanity to install modular homes at affordable rents for teachers and other school district employees. The homes tend to be on the smaller side, but can be multifamily or single family.
“You can build faster. The faster you build — even at a high quality — means the lower the price,” Schaefer said. “We see this as one of the pieces to the puzzle in helping solve the affordable housing crisis.”
There’s a hefty upfront cost to build the factory, and part of the challenge is a lack of state and federal investment, he said. A patchwork of building codes governing how a structure can be built also makes it difficult, requiring changes to the construction depending on the town or county it is being sent to.
Manufactured housing is similar to modular housing, but the units are constructed on a chassis — like a trailer — and they aren’t subject to the same local building codes. That’s part of the reason they are used more broadly across the U.S.
Roughly 100,000 manufactured homes were shipped to states in 2024, up from some 60,000 a decade earlier, according to Census Bureau data. Estimates of modular homes built annually often put them below 20,000.
3D printing is innovative but still ‘a long game’
Yes, there’s technology to 3D print homes.
A computer-controlled robotic arm equipped with a hose and nozzle moves back and forth, oozing lines of concrete, one on top of the other, as it builds up the wall of a home. It can go relatively quickly and form curved walls unlike concrete blocks.
Grant Hamel, CEO and co-founder of VeroTouch, stood inside one of the homes his company built, the wall behind him made out of rolling layers of concrete, distinct to a 3D printer. The technology could eventually reduce labor costs and the time it takes to build an abode, but is farther off than manufactured or modular methods from making a dent in the housing crisis.
It’s “a long game, to start chipping away at those prices at every step of the construction process,” Hamel said.
The 3D printers are expensive, and so are the engineers and other skilled employees needed to run them, said Ali Memari, director of the Pennsylvania Housing Research Center, whose work has partly focused on 3D printing. It’s also not recognized by international building codes, which puts up more red tape.
The technology is also generally restricted to single-story structures, unless traditional building methods are used as well, Memari said
It’s “a technology at its beginning, it has room to grow, especially when it is recognized in code,” Memari said. “The challenges that I mentioned exist, and they have to be addressed by the research community.”
A hemp-and-lime mixture called hempcrete has ‘a bright future’
Hemp — the plant related to marijuana — is being used more and more in the construction of walls.
The hemp is mixed with other materials, most importantly the mineral lime, forming “hempcrete,” a natural insulation that’s mold- and fire-resistant and can act as outer wall, insulation and inner wall.
Hempcrete still requires wood studs to frame the walls, but it replaces three wall-building components with just one, said Memari, also a professor at Penn State University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Memari is now helping oversee research into making hempcrete that doesn’t need the wood studs.
As much as a million hemp plants to be used for hempcrete can grow on one acre in a matter of months as opposed to trees, which can take years or decades to grow.
The plant is part of the cannabis family but has far less of the psychoactive component, THC, found in marijuana. In 2018, Congress legalized the production of certain types of hemp. Last year, the International Code Council, which develops international building codes used by all 50 states, adopted hempcrete as an insulation.
Confusion over the legality of growing hemp and the price tag of the machine required to process the plant, called a decorticator, are barriers to hempcrete becoming more widespread in housing construction, Memari said.
Still, he said, “hempcrete has a bright future.”
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Associated Press video journalist Thomas Peipert contributed to this report from Buena Vista, Colorado.
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Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
More people have been asked to leave their homes in the North Carolina and South Carolina mountains as wildfires spread and the forecast for the rest of the week is not encouraging — dry and windy.
A half-dozen large fires are burning in the Blue Ridge Mountains, putting a lot more gray into the landscape and spreading smoke into places like Greenville.
Millions of fallen trees from September’s Hurricane Helene are both providing fuel for the wildfires and blocking the logging roads and paths firefighters use to fight the blazes and create fire breaks.
Dry conditions, wind and trees downed by Hurricane Helene fueled wildfires in North Carolina and South Carolina, where evacuation orders were in effect Tuesday. (AP Video)
Firefighters have managed to save most of the structures near the fires. Only one injury has been reported — a firefighter in North Carolina got his leg caught under a tree, officials said. At least 15 square miles (39 square kilometers) have burned.
Discouraging forecasts
There is rain in the forecast for the weekend, but it isn’t the kind of soaking downpour that can knock a fire out on its own, said National Weather Service meteorologist Ashley Rehnberg in Greer, South Carolina.
“Hopefully that will at least calm things down briefly,” Rehnberg said.
The bright spot in the forecast for the next week is there is no especially dangerous day where the winds and the dry weather reach potentially disastrous levels like in Los Angeles in January or Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016.
Forestry agencies in North Carolina and South Carolina are already figuring out how to rotate teams of firefighters into and out of the mountains for what could be a long fight.
“Burn bans are in place and people need to follow them,” Rehnberg said. “Even if we do get rain, the weather is going to continue to be a problem as far as we can forecast.”
South Carolina fire update
South Carolina fire officials called for their first round of evacuations Tuesday night. Two fires are burning — a larger one inside Table Rock State Park in Pickens County that has burned 3.6 square miles (9.3 square kilometers) and another one on Persimmon Ridge in Greenville County has burned 1.6 square miles (4 square kilometers).
The fires are about 8 miles (12.5 kilometers) apart and winds are strong enough that authorities decided to evacuate the area between the two fires.
North Carolina fire update
About two dozen homes and outbuildings have been destroyed in Polk County, spokesperson Kellie Cannon said in the latest update.
Three fires have burned at least 9.6 square miles (25 square kilometers) in Polk County and in neighboring Henderson County.
Late Tuesday, a wildfire started in far western North Carolina not far from Bryson City. Police were evacuating some people as the fire spread to nearly 1 square mile (1.6 square kilometers).
Authorities tell people to stop burning
The fires in South Carolina have been caused by humans.
Authorities from local fire chiefs all the way to South Carolina’s governor are urging people to heed burn bans in both states and stop setting fires to burn garbage or at campsites.
“We have people going out in the woods and in their backyards and starting fires when the wind is blowing and everything is dry,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said. “We just have to use common sense. People get out in nature and they forget how dangerous it can be.
