Ingredients
- 1 cup (142g) all-purpose flour (scoop and level to measure)
- 1 cup (200g) granulated sugar
- 6 Tbsp (35g) Dutch process cocoa powder, plus more for dusting pan
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil or canola oil
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
- 6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, finely chopped
- 3/4 cup heavy cream
How to Make Chocolate Cake
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Prepare pan: Spray a 9 by 9 or 8 by 8-inch baking dish with non-stick cooking spray then dust with a little cocoa. Shake out excess cocoa.
- Whisk dry ingredients: In a large mixing bowl whisk together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
- Mix in wet ingredients: Add buttermilk, oil, vanilla and eggs. Whisk mixture until very well blended (about 1 minute).
- Pour batter into prepared baking dish.
- Bake in preheated oven until toothpick inserted into the center of cake comes out clean, about 27 to 35 minutes.
- Let cool completely on a wire rack.
How to Make Chocolate Ganache Frosting
- While cake cools make ganache.
- Place finely chopped chocolate in a medium heat proof mixing bowl.
- Heat heavy cream in a small saucepan over stovetop on medium heat until just simmering.
- Pour hot cream over chocolate then stir with a rubber spatula until melted and smooth.
- Let it cool until it’s a thicker consistency, about 30 minutes* then spread ganache over cake and slice.
- Baking with Zoha - On Zoha's recipes, she includes an overview of the recipe at the bottom of each dish, including an ingredient list that has actual buttons you can check off. This was a really unique piece of site design that I found very helpful when making sure I didn't forget any ingredients.
- Cooking Classy - For this site, one thing I really enjoyed was its use of images. Each recipe on the home page has an image to show how the item looks, as well as has photos for directions; allowing the viewer to have an easy baking experience.
- Joy of Baking - Joy of Baking, similar to what we are using, uses html to make their site. This simple layout gave me great inspiration on how I can use similar layouts to make everything on the home page easy for the viewer to understand.
- Pantone - Pantone’s site, as a color based company, noticeably uses color effectively as it needs to show a variety of colors on the website. To do this, most of the non-images in the site design are black or white, in order for the colors to not overwhelm the viewer.
- Spencer Gabor - Spencer’s work intrigued me especially due to how much it differs from Pantone’s approach to communicative, yet non-overwhelming site design. Most every image, despite there being a lot of kinds of imagery, follows a strict color palette. This color palette is so strong that you can even change the site color at the bottom and the images still work with the new background.
- Ten Years of Source - This site does a great job of explaining things when it breaks Jakob’s Law. For example, if you scroll down a bit, your cursor turns into an orange circle that says “Drag,” showing that you can now drag the background to see new things, even when it doesn’t seem like you could.
Description from Wikipedia, Recipe from Cooking Classy
