Chocolate Loaf Cake
Chocolate Loaf Cake
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| Yield: | 12 to 18 servings |
Ingredients
- 4 ounces butter, preferably at room temperature for easiest mixing
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 tablespoon espresso powder, optional, to enhance chocolate flavor
- 2/3 cup Double-Dutch Dark Cocoa or Dutch-process cocoa powder
- 3 large eggs
- 1 1/4 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
- 3/4 cup milk
Directions
1) Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly grease a 9" x 5" loaf pan.
2) In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, salt, vanilla, baking powder, espresso powder, and cocoa to make a sandy, somewhat clumpy mixture. Don't worry; the eggs will smooth things out.
3) Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl midway through this process.
4) Add half the flour to the bowl, beating at low speed to combine.
5) Add all of the milk, beating at low speed to combine.
6) Add the remaining flour, beating gently just until the batter is smooth.
7) Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
8) Bake the cake for 75 to 80 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. The top may look a tiny bit damp; that's OK. If you have an instant-read thermometer, the center will register 210°F to 215°F, while just under the top will register about 198°F to 200°F.
9) Remove the cake from the oven, loosen the edges, wait 10 minutes, and turn it out of the pan onto a rack to cool.
10) Store completely cooled cake well wrapped, at room temperature.
Yield: 12 to 18 servings.
Reviews
- 12/09/2011
- This was very delicious. Definitely bookmarking this one. I didn't have espresso powder but it was still chocolatey and perfectly moist. Highly recommend:)
Yes, you'll still have great chocolate flavor without the espresso! Using it just bumps up the flavor of the chocolate without tasting the coffee. Happy Baking! Irene @ KAF
- 10/11/2011
- I was very anxious to bake ANY chocolate loaf cake from the numerous recipe's i found across the internet, from 50 yr old cookbooks, or the back of a package of flour mix. I was trying to emulate what I could buy at the market for $3.99 which I enjoyed on a near daily basis. Very expensive snack habit. I studied the ingredients on the package and this was the recipe that came closest to what I wanted. No buttermilk, no yogurt, no baking soda. So after reading this I stopped by the market and picked up the $7 can of Ghirradelli baking cocoa (mixture of dutch process cocoa and other selected chocolate ingredients and some sugar) and went straight home and produced a wonderful, thick, simple cake that I liked, my mom liked, my girlfriend liked... a lot. Total baking time was near and hour and 40 min for an 8.5"x4.5" loaf pan. Didn't fill it up to the top fearing overspill during baking but now realize i could had almost went to the rim and all would had been ok. So I will be making this again x100. Thanks.
- 08/27/2011
- Wow i love this cake! I've been looking for a fine crumbed cake recipe for a while and this is now my new chocolate cake recipe. Made it in loaf from and it was delicious, I will put in less espresso powder next time however, as it was a bit strong tasting. Next mission: a sacher torte-like cake with raspberry filling and ganache topping, YUMMY!
- 08/25/2011
- I made this with the Bensdorp cocoa; it was so good! It was very dense and tasted like a brownie. I toasted pecans and made caramel sauce to go on top.
- 06/25/2011
- This cake is delicious and easy! The cake came out smooth and delicious. I was expecting it to be denser but it is great as is. I am going to slice it this evening and top with fresh sliced strawberries and whipped cream. I ran out of vanilla extract so I substituted almond. Very, yummy!
- 06/11/2011
- Okay then, brace yourself. *grin*
First of all, I wanted to not put in the butter because we've been eating too much butter ever since I started baking in a serious way. I substituted 4 T of olive oil and 2 oz of kefir cheese (lactic acid coagulated curd made from non-fat milk) for the 4 oz of butter.
The sugar I used was sucanat because that is what I like to bake with.
I put in only 1/2 t salt because we generally like a little less salt in things.
I put in 1 T vanilla because we generally like a little more vanilla in things.
I meant to use less baking powder (see below) but forgot because I was thinking it was originally 3/4 t like the salt, so that ended up as the original 1/2 t.
The cocoa was not Dutched.
I've come to realize that the powdered eggs I have been using don't bind properly. For the 3 eggs I substituted 3 T of egg powder (half as much as normal) plus 3 T of flax seeds, well ground. This now required 6 oz of water, 2 oz for each egg. The cake was not crumbly as my recent egg-containing recipes have been, so perhaps the flax worked as advertised. I need to revisit some other recipes that crumbled on me and try flax there.
For the above 6 oz of water I substituted 12 oz of 1:1 ripe sourdough. I disregarded the solids for purposes of adjusting things.
I used 5.25 oz whole wheat flour. This is freshly ground hard red winter wheat.
I used 6 oz water and 1/4 cup powdered instant non-fat milk for the 6 oz of milk.
Because of the acidity of some of my substitution, namely the un-Dutched cocoa, the kefir cheese, and the ripe sourdough, I added 1/2 t baking soda and tried, unsuccessfully, to compensate by adding less baking powder.
I suspect the correct amount was zero baking powder under the circumstances, but in any event I failed to reduce the amount at all.
After beating everything together in my stand mixer, the batter was a little thicker than I tend to think of as cake batter but it was nice and creamy. I stirred in 1 cup of double chocolate bittersweet chips and poured it into the loaf pan.
I cooked it for 60 minutes in my convection microwave oven on 10% microwave power and 325 degrees F. By doing this I hoped to make the chips stay suspended instead of settling. They did, whether because of using microwaves on the cake or not. I tested it with my wire cake tester every so often to get a feel for how it was progressing, and 60 minutes seemed to be about right besides also being the correct conversion of 80 minutes for that microwave setting. I did not take the interior temperature,
since the wire came out clean and the cake was behaving normally other than bursting upwards out of the pan.
The cake had a lighter brown glossy surface except where it had cracked open down the center along a few branches in a couple of places. The interior of the cracks were crumb-colored and textured, but hard like the glossy part. When I say hard, I don't mean unchewable. It was like a brownie crust. The interior of the cake was fine-textured, like in your photo. Last night we ate some of the cake while it was still warm and the chips were still melted. Today they had re-congealed into chips again. My husband says it is the first thing I have baked where the chips really were chips. He likes it very much.
It sounds like you are in the laboratory! I am pleased all your experimenting yielded fruitful (or shall I say, chocolate) results. I have not heard of the microwave trick. Thank you for passing it on. Elisabeth
- 06/11/2011
- I won't horrify you with the little changes that I made to the recipe to suit myself, which resulted in a slightly volcanic rising, but I left untouched the proportion of sugar and cocoa to the rest of the cake and it was delicious.
It is never horrifying to hear of a baker brave enough to explore and make their own adjustments and changes. Great things are learned from such experiments and we are always happy to have you share them with us. ~Amy
- 03/05/2011
- I was looking for a dense cake that would work well in one of those 'giant cupcake' cake pans that I was using for my son's birthday cake. He LOVES chocolate and this recipe worked out really well. It might even be our favorite chocolate cake of ALL TIME. Tomorrow we will cut it, but the slivers I shaved off to level the tops are awesome.
