Sending us into birthday month with a 9x13 cake to feed a small group. My son is turning 7 this month and requested a simple birthday at the local bike jumps with his school buddies. I plan to make one strawberry jam snacking cake from Bon Appetit and this one, a classic. Either works, but I prefer a Dutch-processed cocoa as the color is deeper and the flavor a bit stronger. I have also tried this with Greek yogurt with success!

We have Lori’s Midnight Chocolate Cake in the archives that is excellent, but never hurts to know more than one kind of cake. Adapted from Eating with One Hand by Christine Flynn and Emma Wright.

The original has a simple syrup step that I wasn’t up for, so I put a tad more sugar in the cake mix to compensate. You will get about 18 cupcakes from this amount of batter and shave 5-ish minutes off the baking time.