Let’s get to the point: buttermilk cocoa cake requires no eggs.

Not, mind you, that the eggs, or lack therof, were my motivation for baking buttermilk cocoa cake. What sent me paging through my ragged copy of More Home Cooking was a quart of buttermilk, bought with the best intentions and then…well, “the best intentions” says it all, right?

Now the buttermilk was about to go off, inducing the guilt only an unopened carton or box can evoke. I mean, if food is opened and goes bad, that’s something else, right?

Please tell me I’m not the only person who feels this way. Regardless, the buttermilk didn’t go off. It got baked into buttermilk cocoa cake instead.

In addition to being eggless and using up the buttermilk you bought and didn’t use, buttermilk cocoa cake is easy to make. (Read: no mixer required.) If you have a bowl and a nine-inch/22cm baking pan, you can bake this cake.

Bowl and friends.

I have terrible luck with metal cake pans: the gentlest touch leaves a new pan looking like I took a chisel to it. This is not pictured.

I have much better luck baking cakes in vintage Pyrex glass pie pans, which are easily found online or in resale shops. I recently bought two at my local Goodwill. They cost $5 each and are in perfect condition.

Colwin instructs readers to butter and flour the baking pan, which is perfectly fine. I buttered and cocoa’d instead of flouring. Feel free to laugh at my uneven handiwork, pictured below.

Buttermilk cocoa cake may be prepared with either butter or oil. It’s not often a cake recipe offers options. Hell, it’s not often life offers options.

Anyway, did I photograph either butter or oil? I did not. For the record, I used oil in my cake.

A few words about cocoa: Unless a recipe specifies “Dutched”cocoa, I use whatever cocoa is in the house. This recipe calls for unsweetened cocoa, meaning don’t use drinking cocoa.

If your cocoa has clumps, strain or sift it.

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Any time buttermilk appears in a recipe, the question of substitution arises.

There are numerous ways to fake buttermilk in a recipe. Most involve clabbering milk with vinegar or lemon. One internet recipe suggests mixing cream of tartar into milk. Yogurt, either straight or mixed with milk, is another popular option.

As noted above, I buy buttermilk only for specific recipes. But I always have yogurt in the house, and often use it in recipes calling for buttermilk. So I baked Colwin’s cake using yogurt instead of buttermilk. As I found the first cake a bit heavy, I also increased the amount of baking soda by a half-teaspoon.

Frankly, I think the cake baked with yogurt is better than the buttermilk cake. It’s lighter, more moist, and tastes more deeply of chocolate.

Having said this, buttermilk is hardly a luxury ingredient. You can always buy some, bake yourself a buttermilk cocoa cake, and freeze the remaining buttermilk.  It might separate when defrosted, but it’s still good for baking or cooking purposes. Simply whisk it before using.

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Buttermilk Cocoa Cake is delicious eaten plain, dressed up with a scatter of powdered sugar, or served alongside a scoop of ice cream.

It’s the sort of cake that’s as nice for breakfast–if you’re a cake for breakfast type–as it is after dinner. We may not agree on much right now, but we can all agree the world would benefit from more cake.