Black Cocoa Cake with Butter Whiskey Glaze

Today's recipe for Baked Sunday Mornings is a Chai-spiced Berry Trifle, which sounds delicious, but there was just no way I was going to make a trifle that serves 24 for little old me and I didn't really feel like it was the kind of dessert amenable to sitting out at work all day while people came by and helped themselves. So I decided to go rogue instead and bake Dad's Black Cocoa Cake with Butter Whiskey Glaze from Baked Occasions because it was my Dad's birthday last week, and he's more important to me than the Queen anyway.

This cake is very easy to make, you basically combine your batter ingredients in a medium-sized bowl and whip some cream in your stand mixer (or by hand, if you're a rockstar like my mom).

First whisk the black and regular cocoa powder as well as the espresso powder together in a bowl, then whisk in the hot coffee. I had run out of both black cocoa powder and espresso powder (I guess I've been baking too many chocolate desserts recently), so I used Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa instead. I'm sure the cake would have been even more amazing than it was with the called-for powders, but it was still delicious.

Combine the other dry ingredients in a small bowl, then set it aside. In a different bowl, whisk the brown sugar, oil (I used vegetable, because I hate the taste of canola oil), and vanilla extract. Once the oil is completely incorporated, add the eggs and egg yolks. In three separate additions, add the flour and cocoa mixture to the wet ingredients, beginning and ending with the flour.

Fold the whipped cream into the rest of the batter and pour into your Bundt pan. This batter was really delicious... I'm not normally a cake batter or brownie batter fan, but I could have eaten a lot of this batter straight.

Maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad thing, because this recipe seems to be the only one in the Baked cookbooks that calls for a 12-cup Bundt pan. My pan is the standard 10-cup pan, but it was late and I decided to pray to the cake gods and go for it. Unfortunately for me, this meant I wound up with some overflowed batter on the bottom of my oven. I would always rather eat batter than clean up burned batter, so now I know for next time. It took about 58-60 minutes for my cake to bake through, a little more than the recommended time. After letting it cool for a little while, my cake sank to nearly half its original size. It also was a pain to get out of the Bundt pan. Be sure when you make this you coat the inside of your pan with more butter and cocoa powder than you think is really necessary. Because it is necessary.

My glaze didn't turn out looking quite like the accompanying photo in the book. Even though I didn't add the "extra" ½ cup of powdered sugar, this was more like a thick frosting than an actual glaze. If I had minded, I could have thinned it out more with some cream or whiskey, but I love frosting in all its forms, so I left it as is. The whiskey flavor was quite strong, so be sure you use a whiskey you like. It was good, but I probably would have used a little less whiskey, just because I thought it overwhelmed the other flavors.

I really liked this black cocoa cake, and so did everyone else who tried it. The cake itself is rich, very tender, not too sweet, and of course, decadently chocolatey. It reminded me a lot of another chocolate whiskey cake I've made for my dad, which was also very good.

I've made Baked's black cocoa cake before, and when I did, I froze a few slices of the cake (with the glaze) individually. They were in my freezer for 3 months, then I rejuvenated them by microwaving the cake for 50 seconds (without the icing, which I was able to take it off the frozen cake in one chunk). Reheating the frozen black cocoa cake in this way yielded a really nice, pudding-y textured warm chocolate cake. So if you find yourself with leftovers of this cake, I highly recommend this approach.

You can find the recipe over at Baked Sunday Mornings and check out what the other bakers thought when they made it here.

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