Food You Can Eat: Hershey’s Black Magic Bundt Cake

This will wipe away any fear and loathing you may have about Bundt cakes. This is a very old recipe, it may predate World War II, but it is deee-lish, as Rachael Ray would say. The use of vegetable oil rather than butter makes this moister than a lot of similar cakes.

2 cups sugar

1 3/4 cups flour

3/4 cups cocoa powder, plus more for dusting your Bundt pan. You’re supposed to use Hershey’s but my neighborhood doesn’t stock it, another example of how I’m living like an American ex-pat but still somehow in America, so go with whatever you can find. No offense to Hershey’s, but what you will find will be more expensive and of higher quality.

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

2 eggs, room temp.

1 cup buttermilk. This too is not easy to find around here but it’s out there.

1 cup strong black coffee. This gives enough of a zing. Don’t replace with espresso thinking it would be better. It wouldn’t.

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°. Butter a Bundt pan and dust the inside with cocoa powder, set aside.

Sift together sugar, flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and baking soda in a bowl. Set aside.

In a mixer on low add the milk, coffee, vegetable oil, eggs and vanilla one at a time. mix until everything is incorporated. Then, with the mixer still on low speed, slowly add in the dry ingredients. Once all of the flour mixture is added, mix the batter for a full four minutes on medium speed. This is important. Four minutes, no more and no less. 

Pour the batter into the Bundt pan and bake for 45 minutes, possibly more, or until a toothpick comes out clean. I’ve never needed to do this but from what I’ve heard you may want to rotate the Bundt pan halfway through to even the baking. This has something to do with individual stoves and where the heating element is, I think.

Wrestle it out of the Bundt pan and allow it to cool to room temperature on a wire rack. This should take about 10 or 15 minutes.

I am super lazy sometimes so I just dust this with powdered sugar; it’s chocolate-y enough, I think. If you want to make it as shown in the header image, make Hershey’s Quick Cocoa Glaze.

Melt 2 tbsp. butter in a small saucepan over low heat. Stir in 1/4 cup cocoa and and 3 tbsp. water. Cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Do not boil. Remove from heat. Stir in 1/2 tsp vanilla extract. Gradually add 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar, beating with whisk until smooth. Add additional water, 1/2 teaspoon at a time, until desired consistency.

[I have never done this, so blame Milton Hershey and his corporate descendants if something goes wrong, not me.]