Up until now, the best chocolate bundt cakes I’d had have been made with some combination of cake mix and pudding mix.  Those ingredients never kept me from consuming the cake, but they kept me from making them.  I don’t like to use cake mixes. It’s a weird quirk of mine, but there it is.

I made many a dry chocolate bundt cake from assorted recipes searching for the perfect scratch cake solution.  I wanted a moist, pound cake texture, with a rich chocolatey taste, dark color and fudgey frosting.  If that’s what you want too, this is the recipe.

For the Cake:

• 1 C (2 sticks)Softened Butter (I try to use unsalted if I have it on hand)
• 1-1/2 C Sugar
• 4 Large Eggs
• 1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
• 2-1/2 C All Purpose Flour
• 1/2 C Unsweetened Cocoa Powder (I used Hershey’s)
• 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 C. chopped bittersweet chocolate (I use a hunk off of a Trader Joe’s Bittersweet Bar)
• 1/2 C. chopped walnuts (optional)
• 1 C. Buttermilk

Cream together the butter and sugar.  Beat the eggs in one at a time.  Beat this all within an inch of it’s life. You’re trying to beat in as much air as possible at this point.  The mixture will get lighter in color as you beat it.  Scrape down the sides of the bowl and beat a bit more.  Add the vanilla.

In a separate bowl, sift the flour, cocoa, cinnamon, and baking soda together.  Give this a stir with a spatula or wooden spoon, and mix in the salt.  Add the chopped chocolate and the optional walnuts.

Add the flour/cocoa mixture and the buttermilk all at once to the butter mixture and mix just until things are blended together.  Do not overmix.   There are strong similarities between this batter and the one for the lemon cake recipe in mixing.  Look at the lumpy batter pictures of that cake if you like to see the ideal consistency.  (It was hard to capture the right lumpiness today with a chocolatey batter, maybe because it’s a darker batter)

Butter or spray a 12 cup tube/bundt/kugelhopf pan.  Preheat the oven to 325F.

Spoon the batter into the pan and smooth the top of the batter slightly.  Do not overwork the batter.

Bake for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Because there are chunks of chocolate in this cake, you could have a fully cooked cake with a messy tester if the toothpick is inserted into a melted chocolate chunk, so test a couple of places.  Do not over bake the cake.

Let the cake cool for at least 15-20 minutes in the pan. Turn out onto a cake plate to cool further.

Here’s what a naked cake looks like.  You can eat it just as it is, or sift some powdered sugar over it, or you can go whole hog like we do, and pour icing all over it. The icing below is like additional dessert especially if you use it like I do.

One of the best things about it besides being made of two ingredients, is that it can be poured warm over the cake while the cake is still warm to make a double warm chocolatey dessert.  No need to wait for the the cake to cool completely. I personally like warm chocolate stuff better than cold chocolate stuff.

For the Icing:

• 1-1/2 C Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips
• 1 Can of Sweetened Condensed Milk

Combine the two ingredients in a pot.  Stir and combine over low heat until the chocolate chips melt.  Pour over the cake while the icing is warm.

The icing will solidify as it cools.

You don’t have to use all of the icing.  About 1/2 to 2/3’s of the mixture will generously coat the cake.   1/3 to 1/2 of this mixture could be saved as a great topping for something else.

Here at the home office, we use the middle of the cake as the reservoir for the extra icing. No complaints have been made about too much icing.

Now finish your cake and go run 5 miles.