Chocolate Pound Cake

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Pound cake might be the densest, tastiest, and most filling cake you bake at home. With the addition of a little bit of chocolate and coffee, however, it can become even tastier!

For a simpler chocolate cake, why not make this Chocolate Cake Recipe? Or make this Cream Cheese Pound Cake Recipe instead?

Chocolate Pound Cake

Pound cake has a long tradition in Western cooking, supposedly originating out of convenience because of the ease of measuring its ingredients. Instead of needing to calculate and weigh out all the ingredients carefully, you could simply take a pound of each ingredient and throw it in the batter.

These days, however, pound cake is more of a dense, sweet, and moist cake, rather than a specific requirement only to use 1lb of each ingredient.

Once you abandon this weight requirement for your ingredients, it allows you to start customizing and playing around with your ingredients, including adding chocolate and coffee to make an entirely different type of pound cake.          

Chocolate Pound Cake Ingredients

Make sure you look at the recipe card at the very bottom for the exact amounts so that you know exactly what to buy for this recipe.

• Boiling water

• Cocoa powder

• Instant coffee granules

• Flour

• Baking powder

• Salt

• Butter

• Sugar

• Eggs

• Vanilla extract

• Milk

How To Make Chocolate Pound Cake

• Preheat oven to 325° Grease and flour a round bundt pan.

• In a small bowl, pour the boiling water over the coffee granules. Set aside.

• In a medium bowl mix the flour, baking powder and salt with a whisk until combined. Set aside

• In a large bowl with an electric mixer add the room temperature butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and beat until fluffy – about 4 minutes.

• turn the mixer to medium and add in the eggs, vanilla and cocoa just until mixed.

• Turn the mixer to low and beat in the flour mixture (in fourths) alternating with the whole milk (in thirds), so beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Scraping the sides of the bowl to ensure even mixing. Do not over mix.

• Pour into your prepared bundt pan.

• Bake for 60-70 minutes, until a toothpick in the center comes out clean.

• Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15-20 minutes. Transfer from the pan to the rack and cool completely.

• Sprinkle lightly with confectioners’ sugar

Do You Need To Add Coffee Granules For This Recipe?

This recipe, like a lot of recipes involving chocolate, calls for a small amount of instant coffee granules to be added.

A lot of people balk at this ingredient because not everyone particularly likes coffee. Plus, some people are frightened of the potential for unwanted caffeine in their cake.

However, just like how properly dosed vanilla extract doesn’t make everything taste like vanilla, a little bit of coffee granules aren’t going to make your cake taste like coffee. Nor will it really impart any significant amount of caffeine – you only really use a very small amount compared to all of the other ingredients.

Instead, the coffee adds a background flavor and a little bit of that coffee tartness and bitterness. You won’t really be able to notice that there is coffee within the recipe, but instead, it will make the whole cake taste that little bit more of chocolate.

There is just something about the flavor of coffee that helps to reinforce the flavor of chocolate, which is why it is such a necessary ingredient in this cake.

If you don’t have any instant coffee granules at home and don’t feel like buying any just for this recipe, feel free to use some instant espresso powder or even a little bit of actual coffee or espresso instead.

However, if you do add actual coffee, make sure you are keeping in mind the liquid content of the batter, as extra liquid might make it too soupy and ruin the cake’s final texture.

What To Top Your Chocolate Pound Cake With

Topping a cake is always a personal choice – some people like to keep it light and dust the entire cake with powdered sugar. Some people like to make a thick glaze of icing sugar. Others might prefer something crunchier, like a brown sugar and butter crumb topping.

You can even go big and bold things with toppings like strawberry sauce or a Chocolate Ganache.

A pound cake isn’t just famous for the weight of its ingredients, but also for how much it can fill you up.

Looking for more delicious Cake recipes? Try these out:

• Fully Loaded Carrot Cake

• Classic Banana Cake

• Daffodil Cake

Happy Cooking

Love,

Karlynn

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