Martha Washington's Devil's Food Cake

This heritage devil’s food cake uses a technique you don’t see much anymore: melting unsweetened chocolate with sugar and buttermilk over a double boiler before it ever touches the batter. That step dissolves the sugar completely and creates a glossy, fudgy chocolate base that blends seamlessly into the creamed butter and eggs.

Triple-sifting the cake flour with baking powder, soda, and salt isn’t fussy tradition for its own sake. It aerates the dry ingredients and distributes the leaveners evenly, which is how you get that fine, velvety crumb old-fashioned recipes are known for.

The cake bakes in a single sheet pan, then gets trimmed, cut in half, and stacked into two layers. It’s an clever approach that guarantees perfectly matched layers every time, no worrying about uneven rise between two separate pans.

Pro Tips

• Cool the chocolate mixture completely: Adding warm chocolate to creamed butter melts it, and you lose the air you just worked to build. Patience here means a lighter cake.
• Alternate wet and dry: Adding the flour and buttermilk in small batches prevents the batter from breaking. Start and end with flour.
• Trim the edges: The sheet pan edges bake drier and firmer. Trimming them before stacking gives you a cleaner, softer cake all the way through.

Variations

• Nutty filling: Fold chopped pecans or walnuts into a portion of your frosting and use it as the filling between layers, as the recipe suggests.
• Mocha twist: Add a tablespoon of instant espresso to the melting chocolate mixture for a deeper, coffee-laced flavor.