Chocolate buttermilk cake

I have made so many chocolate cakes.  A Nigella Lawson chocolate cheesecake recipe was the beginning of my baking obsession, around 10 years ago. I made the bloody thing at least 15 times over before I plucked up the courage to make anything else, mind. But once I'd turned over the page, fingers trembling, rolled up my sleeves, taken several deep breaths, and gone for the malted chocolate layer cake, I was away. That was it. I bake a lot of different cakes - fruity ones, and zesty ones, and vanilla ones, and coconut ones, and alcohol infused ones, and South African ones, and retro ones. I always come back to the chocolate cake in times of crisis, much the same way as always wearing blue when I feel least secure about myself (Blue. My Signature Colour.) The highlight of my usually PACKED weekend is the precious couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon that I devote to experimental baking, which usually means, finding another way to bake the perfect chocolate cake. The most perfect chocolate cake I ever baked has long been Nigella's chocolate sour cream layer cake with chocolate sour cream icing. It's so rich I tend to scatter chocolate shavings over the top and leave it at that as the sheer effort of whisking that much butter loses my appetite for anything more indulgent. But yesterday it was toppled from its pedestal by the Magnolia Bakery Chocolate Buttermilk layer cake with vanilla cream icing. What an extraordinary creation this is. For starters, once you've trowelled on your icing, of which the recipe makes enough for 5 cakes never mind 1, and then put your second layer on top of that, and then slathered more icing on, and then piled the top with Maltesers (my invention, that one - I was unstoppable by that point), the whole thing is around 3 feet tall. The ooh factor for scope alone would have any patisserie chef weeping with choco-lust. I am sure there is an obvious scientific reason why buttermilk creates so fluffy a cake compared to the dense fudginess of a cake baked with sour cream. I have no idea what the chemical reaction is. I just know that when I'd finished it, I put it on the table where it towered above the plates in disdainful, regal splendour, and I stared at it. I stared until my tea went cold, which kind of misses the point if the purpose of chocolate cakes is to be eaten. Here's why it's my new winning chocolate cake. Because it takes incredible effort to make. You need to whisk and whip up the ingredients for a minimum of 2/3 minutes per addition to get the cake itself to be as light and frothy a crumb as it should be. You need to whisk the butter for the icing with the sugar for AGES to get it so light that adding the flour and milk mixture, which ought to make it dense, instead gives it texture. Such duvet like texture in fact that when you put it on the cake it rolls slowly to the edge of the cake and then...hovers there. Almost like in a cartoon. And when you cut into it it doesn't collapse. It continues to hover. It almost defies laws of physics. Making this thing is not just baking a cake. It's a cathartic anti-stress exercise. It requires every brain cell to time the preparation exactly right if you care about consistency, and after baking hundreds and hundreds of cakes it's safe to say that I do care. It takes single minded commitment. I even switched off my IPod to make this cake. It is my new Everest. Or it was, until my family and friends snaffled it in seconds. Yay. What a winner the Magnolia Bakery Cookery Book is in my world. And why wouldn't it be. It's been put together by a determined bunch of multitasking women. It's tailor made.