Thanks Heidi for your request. I going to give you two of my favourites: The Black Magic Cake and the One Bowl Chocolate Cake III. I even went back and road tested the recipes for you today. My house is cake-o-rific right now. Thank goodness I have a crowd of hungry men!

I’ll give you my take on both cakes. Click on the names for the recipes:

The Black Magic Cake is my go-to cake. It’s a dense, moist chocolate cake and the coffee amps up the flavour. If you don’t have buttermilk lying around, then you can substitute it with plain yogurt or make your own buttermilk by adding 1 tbs of lemon juice or white vinegar to 1 cup milk.

As with most of the recipes I choose, they can be tweeted to towards your taste by adding different extracts. Example: hazelnut, mint, amoretto, biscotti. I made mine with a little mint and it’s almost gone.


The One Bowl Chocolate Cake is extremely moist and chocolaty. This second fav only because it fudgier (is that a word?) than the Black Magic Cake and I had to modify the original recipe to make it work. Modifications I made: reduced the amount of water to ¾ cups--- add a half a cup more coco and used only 1 egg. You may also want to add pinch of cinnamon.

Tip to make a fluffier cake: Beat your eggs, sugar, extracts and butter separately for 3-4 minutes before adding them to the dry ingredients.

Remember: The higher quality your ingredients, the better the taste. I use Watkin’s and Penzeys extracts and Hershey’s or Ghirardelli chocolate.