chocolate cake #1

There's a certain yin and yang to my cooking habits. When last I wrote, I was making salads, brown rice, and chard, but since then I've been all about chocolate cake. I've baked not one but two chocolate cakes in the last week.

I love cake but I'm not crazy about frosting, so I'm always on the lookout for cakes that are complete unto themselves and don't require buttercream. French yogurt cake is a good example. I'd been reading More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, which I checked out of the library after reading a scathing review of Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte on amazon.com that, among other things, complained that Hesser is no Laurie Colwin. I'm not so sure. I enjoyed Cooking for Mr. Latte at least as much as I did More Home Cooking. To Colwin's credit, upon reading this chocolate cake recipe, I went immediately to the kitchen and started making it.

Buttermilk Cocoa Cake
Adapted from More Home Cooking, p. 161.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. and butter and flour a 9- by 2-inch round cake pan.

2. Mix together the following:

1 3/4 cups flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour)
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

3. To these ingredients add:

1 c. buttermilk (I used 2/3 c. plain yogurt mixed with 1/3 c. rice milk)
1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix.

4. Turn the batter into the pan, bake the cake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean, and let it cool for 5 minutes before turning it out of the pan.

Here's what Colwin says about the cake:

It is hard to encapsulate the virtuosities of this cake. It is fast, easy, and scrumptious. It has a velvety, powdery feel—the result of all that cocoa. It is not so horribly bad for you, because you use buttermilk, which is relatively low in fat, and cocoa powder is defatted anyway. Furthermore, it keeps like a dream and tastes even better after a few days. If you want to be lavish you can dress this cake up by serving it with ice cream or crème fraîche. This mitigates its purist, minimalist virtues, but that is the way of chocolate cakes. They are good in themselves but sometimes call out for window dressing. You can eat them gussied up with all sorts of rich and fattening things or you can leave them quite alone and serve them in pristine, solitary splendor on a nice white plate.

Right after making it, I found the cake disappointing. It isn't very moist, and the texture is crumbly. This is common for eggless baked goods, and I may have caused yet more crumbliness by using whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. The batter, too, is very thick; it seems more like muffin batter than cake batter. The next day, though, the cake was unbelievably delicious. I found myself standing over the pan, cutting myself little slivers and picking up the crumbs with my index finger. It also has the virtue of being easy to veganize. You could use nondairy yogurt instead of buttermilk, or add a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to soy milk.










Next I'll write about chocolate cake #2.