I am somewhat obsessed with trying new kinds of flour. It began with trying to find flours suitable for making tender-chewy Asian dumpling wrappers and then carried over into tricking out grocery store flour for baking crisp and light banh mi rolls. When I’m writing my books, I limit myself to flour brands that are widely available. What’s the point of telling readers about some special flour that they can’t easily get? When a recipe isn’t for a book, I can experiment more. Last Saturday, I experimented on my husband and our friend Jeff Bareilles, a beverage expert. Anyone who eats at our house is subject to my tinkering in the kitchen.
I promised Rory a chocolate cake for July 4 and he asked if I’d make one of my easy go-to recipes: a buttermilk chocolate cake that takes 15 to 20 minutes to assemble (that includes preheating the oven). It’s light, somewhat crumbly and loaded with chocolate flavor. Perfect for the summer. The Gourmet magazine recipe by Laurie Colwin is taped into a recipe keeper kind of binder because it’s from the pre-internet era. It had been years since I made it and I’m a different cook now. This is what happened.
I blended one of my favorite flours – Whole Foods organic all-purpose with a locally grown and milled whole wheat flour. The flour came from Coke Farms. Dale Coke grows for a number of significant restaurants in the Bay Area. His father, retired San Jose State professor Tom Coke, sells his own produce as well as some of Dale’s stuff at our Saturday farmers’s market in Aptos.
I’m intrigued by locally grown grains because that’s the way people use to eat not just wheat, but also rice, corn and other staples. My parents grew up growing their own rice. The result is fresher, a more natural and ‘whole’ product, and often times, tastier food.
Tom had three kinds of flour last Saturday and I decided to buy Jammu, a soft wheat that comes from northern India. I’d thought of making chapati with it but didn’t have time this weekend. The chocolate cake was much easier. I blended Coke Farms’ Jammu with Whole Foods all-purpose – as suggested by the Cokes. I chose Whole Food’s organic flour because it’s actually produced by Central Milling, an excellent miller (try it for the banh mi rolls).
Many years ago, I didn't weigh ingredients as often. Nowadays, I use my digital scale many times a day. To get the proportion just right I weighed the flour -- 4 ⅜ ounces (122 g) of each.
While I had the scale out, I decided to weigh the cocoa. The original recipe called for ¾ cup but I weighed it according the numbers on the back of the Ghirardelli cocoa bag and the volume quantity was more than ¾ cup. Maybe my cake in the past didn’t have enough cocoa? Who knows. It depended on how compacted it was in the container. Also, the cake’s flavor depended on the quality of the cocoa. Ghirardelli is good but if you really like cocoa, consider purchasing a kilo of this stuff.
I also used tasty butter; in the past, it would have been any unsalted butter. Having thought about European-style butter for banh mi made me realize the value of good ingredients. Look at the color from the butter (below). It’s organic butter from Whole Foods; you can get something just like this from Trader Joe’s. Whenever I’ve cooked with it, my food has a deeper flavor.
The good butter goes into the batter. I use oil for lining the pan. If you’re curious, this is how I line a round cake pan.
Rory was watching me stir the batter and when I was done, he remarked, “It looks cement-like.” It’s always been kind of stiff so I added an extra tablespoon of buttermilk to loosen it. In the end, baking time was a tad longer.
We began our fourth of July celebration with cocktails that Jeff mixed (he conjured up a custom cocktail for the Paula Wolfert kickstarter) and we enjoyed it with snacks around 5pm. He popped a bottle of champagne around 7pm to go with shrimp I’d fried (another snack). Rory grilled ribs, corn and squash for dinner. It was around 10pm when we got to the cake.
We were full but the cake went down easy. The wheat flour’s effect was subtle and I wasn't sure how much it had impacted the cake's flavor; with the whole wheat it made the cake a tad more nutritious. However, I felt that all the adjustments I made yielded a better cake. I wasn’t using my usual fancy European cocoa and the cake was splendid, if not the best I'd ever baked.
The lesson is that you don’t have to use pricey, specialty ingredients across the board. A few here and there in a recipe will make a difference.
The three of us ate half the cake. I sent a big piece home with Jeff, and this evening, Rory and I polished off the rest with berries, apricots and whipped cream.
Tweaks you can make to the cake:
- Add one of these to the dry ingredients: 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, ⅓ cup chopped crystallized ginger, or ½ cup chocolate chips.
- Use a neutral oil if you don’t want to use butter but the butter is awfully good!
- If you want to moisten the cake, replace some of the buttermilk with a beaten egg.
- Try 1:1 spelt flour and regular all-purpose flour.
- Follow Jeff’s lead and drizzle an herby or spicy liquor onto the cake. We had chartreuse but rum would be great.
You can take this cake in many directions. It’s easy enough for you to tinker with and not fear failure. And in all the years of my doing stuff with it, I’ve never tossed out a single cake. It's fun to revisit old favorite recipes and apply tweaks that reflect who you are now as a cook.
RECIPE
Buttermilk Chocolate Cake
Yields: A 9-inch cake to serve 8
Ingredients
- 1 stick (4 oz / 112 g) unsalted butter
- ¾ cup (2.5 oz / 72 g) unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 ¾ cups (8.75 oz / 245 g) all-purpose flour, or a 1:1 blend of all-purpose and some other kind of low- or moderate-protein wheat flour
- 1 cup (7 oz / 196 g) sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- Brimming ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (255 ml) buttermilk
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
Method
- Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat it to 350F. Oil a 9-inch, high-sided round cake pan and line it with parchment paper. Flour the pan, tap out the excess flour.
- Melt the butter in a small pan and set aside to cool. Meanwhile, in a bowl, stir together the cocoa, flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Make a well in the center.
- Add the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla. Stir into the dry ingredients until all is moistened and mixed well.
- Pour into the prepared cake pan, spreading the thick batter out to the edge. Bang the pan on your counter to even things out.
- Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until the cake has risen and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool for 10 to 20 minutes before unmolding onto a plate.
