.....in my DH’s Grandmother’s pound cake recipe. Do I need to add baking soda and decrease baking powder? Do you think this recipe would fit in a bundt cake pan? TIA. donna Miz Jane’s Cocoa Cake ·3 cups AP Flour ·2 teaspoons baking powder ·1 teaspoon salt ·½ cup cocoa (Linda uses hershey’s regular) Sift three times. In mixer bowl cream together…. ·2 sticks butter ·½ cup Crisco ·3 cups sugar Add… ·5 eggs (let come to room temperature & add one at a time) ·1 Tablespoon salt Alternately add… ·1 ¼ cup whole milk with dry ingredients. Scrape, mix and pour into a greased tube pan.

Bake in center of a 325ºF oven. Start checking cake at 1 hour 20 minutes (80 minutes).

Miss artie’s tip–After cooling remove from pan and wrap tightly with plastic. If saran is loose, condensation will form. When cool frost and rewrap. Tastes better the second day. Freezes well.

I think you can fit this recipe in a bundt pan and use regular milk with no other substitutions or additions.

If the recipe had called for baking soda rather than baking powder, you would have to adjust for that. The baking powder will work just as well with the milk as with the buttermilk.

I think Donna wants to use buttermilk instead.

That gets tricky becasue of the acid in the buttermilk. You would need to decrease the baking powder (and probably add soda) but by how much I have no idea.

I think Donna wants to use buttermilk instead.

That gets tricky becasue of the acid in the buttermilk. You would need to decrease the baking powder (and probably add soda) but by how much I have no idea.

Am I missing something? Why would you have to change?

With either buttermilk or milk, the baking powder will deliver the same amount of gas. The cream of tartar in the powder assures that in a non-acidic environment. It can’t deliver more gas in a more acidic environment.

Yes, I do want to use buttermilk. I only have skim & buttermilk in the frig.

I checked out a few recipes with buttermilk & they all call for bpowder and bsoda.

I give it a shot subbing buttermilk as the only change. Thank you for your ideas. donna Sorry for posting in the wrong topic.

Let us know how it goes, Donna.

This topic is fine.

The buttermilk is more acidic than regular milk, which will throw off the baking powder. That’s my theory, at least.

This is from Baking911. I think it answers the question in the inverse.

"It’s best to use whatever the baking mix calls for. The leaveners in the recipe are formulated to activate based upon the pH of the ingredients. If the boxed mix said to add buttermilk, the batter’s leaveners are formulated to counteract its acidity. The baking soda in the mix activates from the acid, provides carbon dioxide for leavening and at the same time neutralizes the flavor of the acidity in the batter giving you a nice taste and texture (too much acid in a batter would give you a craggy and uneven texture). If you added milk instead, the recipe would taste almost bitter or salty from the unneutralized baking soda in it unless it had baking powder instead."

Last edited: Nov 7, 2007

I guess we’ll have to wait until Donna reports back.