Chocolate Cake From Scratch
Sometimes I think it’s a shame that cake mixes were ever invented. Cake mixes are seen as time savers, but often the only time they really save you is not measuring a few ingredients like flour, sugar, and baking soda. That’s a little task that only takes a brief minute or two!
For most cake mixes, you’ll still get out your mixing bowls and beaters, you’ll add the eggs, and usually some oil and water. It’s not that much different than making the cake from scratch.
In fact I read recently that early cake mixes were designed so you only needed to add water but nobody was buying them. The manufacturers discovered it made cooks feel rather useless. So cake mixes were re-designed so you needed to add some eggs or oil or something just so it felt like you were really cooking something up in the kitchen. Yes, we want to feel like we’re making our own stuff!
Enough time has gone by and cake mixes have become such a part of the culture, that many cooks have lost the knowledge of how to make their own cake from scratch. The time convenience now might be more about not having the time to scour the internet for a scratch recipe.
How to make a Chocolate Cake from Scratch
So if you’re on the search for a way to make a cake from scratch, here’s an option for a chocolate cake that’s easy to do. It uses basic ingredients that you’re likely to always have on hand, it goes together almost as quickly as any cake mix, and tastes great too!
It starts by combining the dry ingredients of flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. Then in a separate mixing bowl, some butter and sugar, and some eggs and vanilla, are mixed together with an electric mixer.
Next, gradually mix in the dry ingredients and some milk, alternating between the two. Once all the dry ingredients and milk have been added, beat with your electric mixer on high speed for a couple more minutes. Then you’ll have some lovely chocolate cake batter that can be poured into a greased 9×13 pan and baked.
Once your cake is baked you can frost it with the frosting of your choice.
I also used this cake recipe to make a tiny layer cake that we used for a one-year old birthday party. These little cakes are known as “smash cakes” as the little birthday person can dig in and smash his or her little cake. You can find those details here: One year old birthday party smash cake
More recipes to try:
Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:
- 1¾ cup flour
- ⅔ cup cocoa powder
- 1½ teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 8 tablespoons butter – softened
- 1¼ cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1½ cups milk
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9×13 pan.
- Combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium size mixing bowl and set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar with an electric mixer, and then mix in the eggs and the vanilla.
- Next, gradually mix in the dry ingredients and the milk, alternating between the two. Once all the dry ingredients and milk have been added, beat with your electric mixer on high speed for a couple more minutes.
- Pour the batter into the greased 9×13 pan. Bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the cake comes out clean.
- Let cool and frost as desired.
I agree it does not take much longer to bake from scratch. Since I rarely bake I usually don’t have at least half of the ingredients. I have ended up tossing out a lot of stuff when i opted to buy everything needed to bake from scratch because it reached or passed tthe expiration date. If I get the urge for a chocolate cake I will usually buy a Jiffy mix, but your recipe would work too if I had everything on hand.
That’s a valid point Margo that if you don’t often cook or bake, you might not have the things you need on hand and it might be more cost effective to just buy the mix. For someone like me who likes to make things in the kitchen, I usually have all the supplies on hand.