CHOCOLATE CAKE

Part of the reason I started The Vanilla Bean Blog revolved around chocolate cake. I was interested in creating some kind of family food history, an idea sparked when I realized my family did not have a cake to call our own. We bought cake and occasionally made cake, but no one ever requested a specific cake for birthdays, and there wasn’t one particular recipe that made us swoon. I decided that needed to change.

I made chocolate cake after chocolate cake, only to come up with some not-so-great confections. Often they turned out dry or were missing that deep, dreamy chocolate flavor I was after. Eventually, however, I stumbled on black magic cake. Black magic cake has a history of its own; it’s a Hershey’s original, developed sometime before the 1970s and used as a label recipe in 1972. There are claims that the recipe goes back to possibly the 1930s, but no one knows the exact date of its creation; not even the Hershey Company could tell me when I reached out to them. All the usual cake ingredient suspects are there: sugar, flour, eggs, cocoa powder, vanilla, and oil, but what makes this recipe unique is at the end of mixing, one cup of hot coffee is added to the bowl. As the coffee is gently stirred in, the batter turns into an unpromising dark sludge, but bakes up into a moist, delicious cake.

Over the years, I discovered two things about black magic cake. One, the cake had made the rounds: many cookbooks and almost every website has some version in its pages; often hot water replaces the coffee (I even found a variation substituting tomato soup) and milk is used instead of buttermilk. Two, I wanted this cake to have more chocolate flavor. Topped with chocolate buttercream, it was indeed perfect, but paired with any other kind of frosting, I found it lacking. So I started testing, melting bittersweet chocolate and adding different amounts to the cake until I was pleased with the flavor. I added a little more flour as well; the cake constantly shed crumbs, and the extra flour helped. I liked my changes, but the cake was the tiniest bit too dry. One night, when I was up late once again making cakes, I accidently cracked an extra egg into the batter. When the cake baked up, it was exactly as I dreamed it should be: moist and tender, with perfect chocolate flavor. I tried it with various other frostings and it held its own. I finally had my family cake. makes two 8-inch cakes

3 ounces (85 grams) bittersweet chocolate

1 cup freshly brewed coffee, hot

1 cup buttermilk

½ cup canola oil

3 large eggs, room temperature

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 cups (284 g) all-purpose flour

2 cups (396 g) sugar

¾ cup (75 g) Dutch process cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

Adjust an oven rack to the middle position. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter and flour two 8 by 2-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment paper.

Put the bittersweet chocolate in a small bowl. Pour the coffee over it and cover with a piece of plastic wrap. In a medium bowl or liquid measuring cup, whisk the buttermilk, canola oil, eggs, and vanilla.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, mix the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt on low until combined. (If the cocoa powder is lumpy, you can sift it into the other ingredients.) With the mixer running on low, slowly add the buttermilk mixture. Increase the speed to medium and beat until combined, 20 to 30 seconds.

Whisk the chocolate and coffee together until completely smooth. With the mixer running on low, slowly pour the coffee mixture into the batter and mix until just combined. Using a spatula, give the batter a couple of turns to make sure it is fully mixed.

Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pans. Bake 25 to 35 minutes, until a wooden skewer or toothpick comes out with the tiniest bit of crumb.

Transfer the cakes to a wire rack and let cool for 30 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto the rack, remove the parchment paper, and let cool completely. Once cool, the cakes can be wrapped in plastic and refrigerated overnight or frosted.

VARIATION

chocolate–olive oil cake • Replace the canola oil with a good olive oil.

NOTES: This recipe will also work with 9 by 2-inch round cake pans and can be baked in three pans; for details and baking times, see here .

You can substitute hot water for the hot coffee, but the overall chocolate flavor will lack some depth.