Everyday Chocolate Cake

About a month ago, I discovered the frame for what is now my go-to chocolate cake recipe. It's simple (you only dirty up one bowl!), delicious, and not too sweet. Perfect for dark chocolate lovers. I found it on the smitten kitchen website.

It's an amazing recipe, but once I mastered it I couldn't help tweaking things a bit. Experimenting. Making it my own. By substituting half the buttermilk in the original recipe with brewed coffee (something we always have quite a bit of around here) I ended up creating what is now my standard chocolate cake:

Chocolate Cake

adapted from smitten kitchen where it was adapted from Magnolia Bakery At Home

1 stick butter, softened

1 c brown sugar

½ c granulated sugar

1 egg

½ c buttermilk

½ c brewed coffee

1 t vanilla extract

1 ½ c flour

¾ c cocoa powder

¼ t baking soda

½ t baking powder

¼ t salt

-Preheat the oven to 325° F.

-In a good-sized mixing bowl, combine butter and sugar. Mix it really well, trying to make it as smooth as possible (I just use a spatula and some elbow-grease and hope for the best). Crack in the egg, and get that nicely mixed in.

-Pour in your buttermilk, coffee, and vanilla and get that all mixed in. At this point the batter is going to look tan-ish and vaguely curdled. Yummy! Don't worry, it'll turn out well.

-Sift in all your dry ingredients (the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt). I just use the measuring cup and sort of shake it onto the batter.

-Mix your batter until it stops looking dusty, then stop.

-Look at how much batter you have, and find a loaf or cake pan that looks about the right size (the batter should fill your pan about ¾ full). Grease and flour that pan, and then scoop in the batter. Throw in the oven for 60-70 minutes.

You can also turn this into muffins by putting the batter in muffin tins. There are a lot of other things you can do to change up this recipe. Soon I'll share my most recent chocolate cake experiment.

Buttermilk- You can buy it at the store, but it's a lot easier to just make your own. For 1 cup of buttermilk use 1 cup of regular milk and pour in 2 tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. Let it sit for a couple of minutes, until curdles start to form.

For this recipe I use ½ c of milk, and 1 tablespoon of vinegar.

t = teaspoon
T = tablespoon
c= cup