Homemade cake and coffee, because one without the other is worse. the cake is homemade so the day begins on a personal note.
i started with Elizabeth David's shooting cake ( English Bread and Yeast Cookery), and gradually added others. my favorite is a cocoa cake i developed from a recipe published by PJ Hamel.
Conceptualize
this cake is versatile, so it's important to consider how it will be served. Hamel's suggestion (vanilla ice cream, pecans, chocolate ganache, and whipped cream) is downright direct. i think i would prefer a fruit sauce, but am too lazy to make one. instead, i see this cake as a grown-up version of a chocolate candy bar. not a fluffy/light candy bar, more interesting than plain chocolate ... dark, dense, and serious. if you add nuts, they should be toasted black walnuts.
(January 23, 2026 — black walnuts are not easy to buy, so i started substituting chopped, dried orange peel. it's nice to add something that makes the texture less uniform, and the flavor works well here. soak the peel in the liquid ingredient(s) or you'll be sorry :-)
Substitute
recipes like this invariably call for the sponsor's products so substitution is prudent. instead of espresso powder, substitute brewed coffee for some of the liquid.
a blend of natural and Dutch-process cocoa might improve the cake's texture, but a change to this part of the recipe entails adjusting the amount of sugar.
to reduce the technology in my cakes, i use baking soda instead of baking powder, adding the soda with the flour in the usual way. to make this substitution work, i use buttermilk and vinegar instead of milk.
finally, i omit the salt and the vanilla. i've served this cake to many people and nobody seemed to notice.
Mix
lack of counter space became dire need, so i never unboxed my DeLonghi DSM5. (someday i will use it to make rye flour?) i use a KitchenAid KHM900 hand mixer.
(when it started to hesitate at its lowest speed, lubricating it seemed to help. moving definitely helped; i think the voltage is higher here. after about 16 years, the beaters started to wobble. the replacement beaters sold by Goodman's seem better than the original ones :-)
for this recipe, the usual butter-sugar-eggs sequence doesn't work well. if the butter is soft, creaming it before adding the sugar is unnecessary.
to avoid making a cloud of cocoa, add it before the eggs. i add the eggs all at once, and mix thoroughly so the batter resembles frosting.
the dry ingredients are usually added at this point, but it's easier to add the liquid instead. this is possible whenever the batter isn't too thin afterward.
i like to stir the dry ingredients into the batter with the hand mixer before turning on its motor, finishing the job in the usual way. this is when overmixing is possible, but the risk is minimal with a hand mixer.
Bake
greasing the sides of the pan is unnecessary. (people who grease pans with aerosol products should consider their environmental impact.) lubricating the bottom of the pan might also be unnecessary.
wiping the batter off the mixer's beaters with a finger is so easy, i wonder about the custom of eating it instead. after all, if baking didn't improve batter we'd eat all of it raw.
my loaf pans are glass and temperature adjustment seems unnecessary, but my cake needs more than 70 minutes.
Serve
i leave the cake in its pan and cut/remove slices with a pastry server. the glass lids for my loaf pans don't fit that tightly, but a cake lasts a week on my counter. i refrigerate the cake when fruit flies are visiting.
when the end is near, i measure my slices so the last one is thinner than usual. the last portion includes accumulated crumbs and any cake clinging to the side of the pan. eating this with a teaspoon is so much better than eating batter, and it makes the pan clean enough to reuse.
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