I want to “chocolatize” a pound cake recipe. I want to use cocoa.
How do I compensate for the way the dry cocoa will throw off the moisture balance in the recipe?
My thought would be to mix the cocoa with sufficient soft butter to make it easy to blend with the batter without further adjustment. But baking is a very precise kind of thing and I’m not sure this would work. Rather than play at being America’s Test Kitchen, I wondered if anyone knew of a specific technique for doing this?
I got lazy when I needed to make one and googled for a recipe, I went with this one, it was very nummy.
How about comparing your recipe to this one and see how it is different.
I’ve found simply including the cocoa as part of the flour works pretty well for me. So instead of, say, 6oz flour, 5oz flour and one of cocoa. Add a pinch of baking powder too if the flour you were using is self raising. It may depend how chocolaty you like your cake.
I’ve never tried to see what it would be like if you replaced ALL of the flour with cocoa though! Hmmm… I smell a worthy experiment 
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines as Aspidistra. My favourite cookie recipe converts to chocolate by omitting three tablespoons of flour and adding three tablespoons of cocoa.
I too substitute flour for cocoa. Works pretty well - though there’s a little less gluten to go around, so the cake is often a little more solid. But I like more solid cakes, so everyone wins.
Hint: Dust the pan with cocoa instead of flour. Works the same, doesn’t show up.
That’s what the cake recipes I know do. Then again I’m no baker, basically I know how to make yoghurt bizcocho and yoghurt chocolate bizcocho… the only difference is “less flour, add nesquik”. Being Spanish recipes, you’re supposed to tweak the ingredients a bit until the texture is right, too (you start by adding in a bit less of everything than the written recipe asks for).
The butter would contribute both fat and moisture, and though I’m no baker, reading the introductions to Cook’s Illustrated recipes (where they discuss the trial-and-error process) leads me to believe that changing both would throw off the recipe more, not less.
Also, add a teaspoon of instant espresso powder to any recipe involving chocolate. (Medaglia D’Oro is usually what I find in the grocery store.) Adds a dark, rich, complex note without ever being coffee-y.
I think the OP was suggesting using the butter already called for in the recipe. But I agree with above posters- substitute whatever amount of cocoa you want to use for the equal amount of flour. I would also suggest adding vanilla if your recipe doesn’t already, since vanilla brings out the flavor of chocolate nicely.
My mother’s recipe (and she used to run a little cake baking business on the side) was to buy a chocolate cake mix instead of a yellow cake mix, lol
No, that doesn’t change the ratios.
The extra fat never hurts…hehehe. I guess I’ll try swapping out the flour…
Thanks.
(it’s all because I miss Sara Lee chocolate pound cake… great stuff, especially warmed up with a little butter. Don’t freak, tastes fabulous. No more outrageous than frosting.)
Don’t swap equal amounts of flour for cocoa. Cocoa does not have gluten and leaving out that much flour can really screw up a pound cake. Really, you only need to pull out a little bit of flour and even then only if you are using more than about 1/4 cup of cocoa. Flour is much more dense than cocoa powder as well, so if you are doing the swap by volume you will really mess things up trying to do an equal swap.
I do chocolate cookies all the time by just adding 1/4 c cocoa powder to a chocolate chip cookie recipe. Works perfectly.
To make things easy on yourself, pull out 1 to 2 T of flour. Add between 1/3 to 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. evaluate results and go from there.
As long as we’re discussing this, I’m a little confused about the gluten issue when it comes to cake. Over and over again we learn that tenderness and flakiness are preserved by gentle treatment of the batter or dough, because working dough develops gluten, which is great for creating the desirable tough structure of bread, but disastrous for pie crust, cookies, and muffins.
Then you find all these cake recipes, including one for pound cake that sounds terrific, which call for lots and lots of beating of the batter to achieve a great texture!
So what is it about cake making as opposed to cookies, pie crust, and muffins that stops all that beating from forming excess gluten and making the cake tough?
I’ve never made a cake with gluten, the flour is always corn/maize/ uhm, the kind that comes in ears and you can pop… which is gluten-free. Same for my sister-in-law’s recipes (and she *is *a baker, her pies and cakes are to die for), she couldn’t even understand why would anybody have to make gluten-free cakes specially. I had a coworker who was also a superb baker: again, maizena, not wheat flour.
You can’t “make” gluten, it’s a proteinic component of most grains. It’s what celiacs can’t eat.
Without looking at this thread I would probably increase or balance cocoa with more moistening butter and eggs, or egg yolks…
What I have heard about the gluten issue in cakes is that the amount of butter prevents the gluten strands forming. Makes them too slippery to stick together or something.
I once made chocolate BREAD with vanilla butter. The bread was incredibly chewy, like…well, home baked bread. You’d look at it and think ‘chocolate cake’, but it wasn’t.
I’d read it’s easier to make a moist chocolate cake than a moist yellow cake, that they are two separate things, so you take your chances trying to chocolatize a yellow cake recipe.
Perhaps the fact that the beating is done before the flour is added? I was taught by my mum and grandmothers to work the pre-flour batter as energetically as possible to make sure you work a lot of air into it, but to use a very delicate touch with the flour. You know, sift it over the surface and cut it in with gentle movements. “Caress the flour into the batter”, my mum would say.