OK, Maybe I'm just crazy or 40 pounds heavier, now....but I have been testing recipes. See, I'm gonna start selling my cakes here soon in a business, and really want the best tasting baked goods. Well, I usually use doctored mixes, and made a scratch vanilla cake and WOW it was great, texture, flavor, moist. Had a custard like tase...yum.

Next, Chocolate I pulled out one of my fav's that I haven't made in years. Nope, i could taste something like flour and dry, even the color is off. So I sifted, and tweeked it and tried again, nope actually tasted "fake". I'm stumped. My chocolate DH doctored recipe gets raves from all, including me. I'm a choco-holic

Should i just stay with what works??? Any suggestions?

I'm also in the "yes, stay with what works" but I'm also an advocate of if you never try anything new then you'll never get anywhere different.

So hang onto what is working for you, but as you experiment with new things ......

Have you tried the choc cake recipe on the Hershey Cocoa can? It's so far the only scratch cake I can make well; very moist; very chocolatey tasting without me being able to taste the cocoa "powder" taste (hate that!).

may I ask for your recipe for the scratch vanilla cake and what you do to doctor your chocolate? I've been using the Cake Doctor basic white sour cream WASC, and I've tried the Darn Good Chocolate Cake without chocolate chips. The Darn Good Chocolate cake made superb cupcakes, but seemed too wet and dense for the sheet cake I made, but everybody else loved it.

I'm trying to get a cake with very few crumbs.

Thanks

Being myself a total chocoholic it took me ages to get a really good scratch chocolate cake recipe! In my view a chocolate cake should be light and moist and not too heavy. Eventually I found a fantastic recipe ( or should I say magic ingredient?!) that really transformed my cakes - buttermilk! I've just made a batch of chocolate cakes for a wedding cake consultation I have this evening and I made some extra for my kids! I love the recipe as it's moist, soft and chocolatey without being too rich!

If you wanted the recipe, I'd be happy to send it to you, just pm me.

I agree, buttermilk seems to be the key in my chocolate cake. I would love the scratch vanilla cake recipe if you are open to sharing. I use a doctored cake mix for my vanilla cake, but would love to have a go to scratch one. If you want the chocolate cake recipe - just let me know.

Could someone please tell me the name of the Hershey's cake on the can. I can't find that brand of cocoa in the grocery stores here but I do have a Hershey's cook book. It has a few chocolate cake recipes in it so I'm not sure which one it is. Thanks.

I, too, just tried a bunch of different recipes this weekend, including the Hershey's chocolate, and I have to say, it was just "ok." It didn't wow me, but maybe the impressive part is that it is scratch? I also baked some scratch WASCs and a box WASC and the difference in the textures was so interesting. The scratch cakes weren't bad or anything, but the boxed WASC was just so smooth and velvety and rose so nicely. I did half a cake with the box and half scratch and gave it to some friends. I told them about my experiment and to get back to me to let me know if they can figure out which one is the doctored box.

I think you could just keep experimenting until you make up your mind. I'm also interested in your scratch wasc recipe.

Thank you!

Thanks everybody, I'm still trying recipes...gonna be sick of chocolate soon!

I have been using :
1 bx DH devil's food
1 sm bx instant ch. pudding
1/3 c oil
1 c s. cream
4 eggs
1 c. hot coffee

Bake @ 325


The scratch vanilla i'll have to get measurements, doing by weight/ratio.