I've been doing some research to fix my chocolate cake recipe. It calls for baking powder and baking soda. The recipe calls for one cup of buttermilk so I know I need the baking soda to react with that. Do I still need the baking powder to help it rise?

Here's the recipe

2 cups sugar

1 3/4 cups flour

1 cup cocoa

2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla

1 cup hot water

this is almost exactly hershey's perfectly perfect chocolate cake recipe -- there's a slight difference with a quarter cup more cocoa, a half teaspoon more baking powder, change the milk to buttermilk -- but the ingredients are written in the same order so someone is just tweaking what is already a perfectly perfect recipe -- not saying you just saying wherever you got it -- which is all fine -- so if you make those changes you'll have a great chocolate cake --

if you want a dark chocolate cake with buttermilk -- i'd go collect a few worthy* ones online with the word fudge in the name  or dark chocolate -- because they already have the basic formula down pat no worries -- then compare them all and just plug in the ingredients you want -- you are 10,000 times more likely to have a viable end product than deconstructing/reconstructing this  -- it's just 10,000 times easier than thinking this through -- maybe getting it and testing and re-testing it -- take an already great chocolate buttermilk cake recipe and go for it

betty crocker is a good place to start like this one

http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/best-chocolate-cake-with-fudge-frosting/ee6153e7-dd8c-47ae-bd88-8fc70ce57a24

*ones with good reviews

All of my recipes with buttermilk either have baking soda or they have a boatload of baking powder (e.g for a recipe about this size, 1 tbsp.)

I was kinda hoping for a little more scientific answer. I know for a recipe containing milk you generally use a 1:1 ratio of cups flour to teaspoons baking powder. I've researched and found that when using buttermilk baking soda reacts best at a ratio of 2:1 cups buttermilk to teaspoons baking soda. I guess my simplified question is do I need bother for the cake to rise properly?

yes you need baking soda and baking powder -- the link i posted has just a little of the leavening but it does have both and it has an increased amount of chocolate -- win win no no?

your original question was do you need both -- do you need to bake without baking powder or something? you can make your own baking powder with half teaspoon of cream of tartar and quarter teaspoon of baking soda -- so that would increase your baking soda when you add them together --

are you wanting to devise 'original' recipes or eliminate baking powder or bake a nice dark chocolate buttermilk cake -- not sure where we are :)

because the baking powder has a stabilizer in it -- the cream of tartar

but there's probably chocolate cake recipes that only have one or the other -- idk -- i'm not especially scientific with baking -- hopefully someone else can chime in for you

I'm just wondering if both are necessary. It doesn't matter if I use both or just one. I just noticed with some recipes it only calls for baking powder, but this one calls for both. One time I made it the cake fell in the middle so I eliminated the baking soda and it turned out fine. Now from my research it seems like the baking soda is kinda necessary. I'm gonna try it with a tsp of powder and a half tsp of soda and see what I get.

the recipe in the link uses a tsp of soda and a half of powder --