Chocolate Cake Tour

 

I think chocolate cake is one of the most perfect desserts.  This means I have collected several chocolate cake recipes, each suited for a different use.  At the easiest end of the spectrum there is the wacky chocolate cake recipe.  No butter, no eggs (making it an option for those who don’t eat those things), very easy to mix up with small people as assistants, and it turns out with the texture of a boxed cake mix but much better flavor.

Having the texture of a boxed mix cake, that one can’t survive much handling.  When I want to make something to be poked, frosted, and bedecked, I turn to either Wilton’s chocolate fudge groom’s cake or Cook’s Illustrated’s chocolate genoise.  The first is a chocolate version of a traditional butter cake, and so has a denser, drier crumb and milder chocolate flavor.  It also doesn’t fall apart or shed crumbs much while being handled.  The second is a classic European sponge cake and is more tricky to make, requiring the extreme whipping of eggs and careful of addition of sifted flour and melted butter.  It is less sweet than most American style cakes, which makes it popular with the Europeans, and being lighter than a butter cake, works well for Black Forest cake or anything that gets decorated with whipped cream and fruit.

The cake I most often use for something fancy, though, is the cake base of the Sensational S’more Torte.  I made the entire thing as my birthday cake a few years ago and received rave reviews, but the cake itself is a very versatile thing.  Good with basic American ingredients, it really shines when made with standard European ones (richer butter, cake flour, dutch-processed cocoa, fromage frais), baking up into a rich tasting, moist, fairly dense crumbed cake.  I mean “dense crumbed” as a compliment here—this is a cake I can cut and stack and frost back together without it exploding into crumb confetti, and everyone loves it.

Well, almost everyone.  I had the shocking experience once to ask my husband what kind of cake he liked and he said “creamy ones.”  After some interrogation, I found that he meant things like cheesecake (particularly the German kasekuchen) or things with a cake base topped in mousse or custard (the French fraisier is a classic, and requested, example).  So we had to find common ground elsewhere.

The flourless chocolate cakes would work, except I am weird about bitterness in my chocolate cakes and so don’t care for most of the recipes I’ve tried.  The only one I’ve made that I liked was David Leibovitz’s Chocolate Idiot Cake, which happens to also have the trickiest baking method I’ve seen for this sort of thing; it requires a water bath, which mean I get to hunt for something large enough to hold my springform pan, and then deal with leaks and boiling water when the cake is baked.  I make it to impress my in-laws.

More to my liking are the chocolate lava or chocolate volcano cakes, little chocolate cakes with molten chocolate centers served searing hot with a generous scoop of ice cream.  I use a Cook’s Illustrated recipe but alas, I have never managed to make these that well in my own kitchen.  They always fall apart when I try to extract them from their ramekins for serving.  It makes for a much more messy, if still delicious, presentation.  I’ve found that the hot chocolate pudding cake has much the same flavor (which is to say, it is awesome) if one is not worried about presentation.  I again use an oft-tweaked Cook’s Illustrated recipe, but here I encourage people to find the original.  In the months before my mother got that particular magazine back to me, I made a few of those variations floating around the internet, and none of them were nearly as good.

 

I’ve been digging through all my recipes this past week, as I spent way too much time debating what this year’s birthday cake would be.  The winner?

  

The torte of the sensational smore’s tort, with frosting and glaze taken from smitten kitchen’s chocolate peanut butter cake, with cookie dough ice cream on the side.  The finished cake was 5 inches (13 cm) in diameter.  It was a good birthday.