Old-Fashioned Recipe for Luscious Chocolate Cake

Easy and Delicious Chocolate Cake

Need a recipe for an everyday dessert, or a special-occasion treat? 

This rich chocolate cake has a very tender crumb, is easy to make, and only needs simple pantry ingredients! John requests this cake every year on his birthday, and when I’m in the middle of tons of garden chores, like this week, I like this recipe because it doesn’t take too much time.

I especially like this cake because it calls for baking cocoa, instead of bittersweet or baking chocolate that I don’t normally buy. The one item you might not have on hand is buttermilk, and you can easily sub in regular milk soured with a spoonful of apple cider vinegar, and it works great.

Cake recipe

I got this recipe from an older friend, whose grandmother passed the recipe down to her.  A lot of old-time recipes will assume that the baker has a lot of knowledge and experience—and as you see, my friend didn’t specify the size of baking pan, or how long you mix various ingredients. Nor does she specify using a mixer or doing it by hand. But I’ve found it’s a pretty fail-safe recipe no matter what you do!

The other fun thing is the leavening agent—baking soda—isn’t mixed in the flour like in most recipes, but added to the buttermilk/sour milk. When you add the alkaline soda to the acidic sour milk, it foams up, which creates a very light batter that rises nicely during baking.

I have a tendency to use extra cocoa, hoping all those anti-oxidants in the cocoa counteract all the sugar a tiny bit! But whether you go light or heavier with the cocoa, it’s delicious.

Organic baking ingredients!

I try to use as many organic ingredients as possible—we buy white flour from Cairnspring Mills, located in the Pacific Northwest, and this product is a lovely, creamy color, as opposed to the stark white of conventional white flour.

For the final blending, once I’ve added the flour and salt, I hand-mix fairly vigorously for about 100 strokes. This recipe works with a 9” x 13” baking pan, and if you want to half the recipe (which is what I do), I use a 10” pie pan and bake for about 35-40 minutes. And as with most cakes, you grease and flour the pan first.

For the frosting, my friend melted things together in a microwave (not exactly “old-fashioned) but I just use softened butter and mix by hand.

That’s my piece in the photo at bottom…please don’t judge me but as a chocolate hound, I always give myself an extra dollop of frosting on the side. The frosting on the top of the cake just isn’t enough!

You'll note below that the recipe includes evaporated milk. I know that will give the frosting extra creaminess, but I like using real milk, preferably whole. And half-and-half is even better!

This frosting recipe also calls for “oleo” which further dates it…my father-in-law was born in the late 1920s, and he used that term for margarine. It goes without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that butter in your frosting is the only way to go!

But please do not use “oleo”!

A big piece of cake after an afternoon of gardening!