Chocolate Cake

Chocolate cake is a staple dessert – rich, dark, and decadent.  Some folks prefer milk chocolate, but if one truly loves chocolate, one wants it dark.  It’s akin to the idea that if you eat your steak well-done, you don’t enjoy beef.  I personally have my chocolate cake as black as midnight; something like Hershey’s Black Magic cake will do.

You can get a dark and rich color in chocolate cake by alkalizing the chocolate with baking soda.  An alkalized cocoa powder, aka Dutched cocoa, will help get you there.  If you want it midnight black, however, there is more you can do.  Using baking soda to further alkalize Dutched cocoa darkens it further, but it gets tricky.  Too much baking soda leads to over-leavening, so that the cake will collapse in the center.  The way to circumvent this problem is to boil the mixture of cocoa, baking soda, sugar, and water.  It allows the baking soda to react with the cocoa to darken it, while some of the baking soda releases carbon dioxide due to heating, reducing the amount of leavening, thus preventing sinkage.  Hershey’s Special Dark is half Dutched cocoa and half natural cocoa, so alkalizing it further with baking soda is especially useful, but you can find other brands containing 100% Dutched cocoa.

To amp up the chocolate flavor and color, employ coffee instead of plain water.  Chocolate is powerful; not many can stand up to it, but coffee is one of them.  I have sneaked coffee into chocolate recipes and found that it has improved it every time.  The brownies are not rich? -it may delight to add a spoonful of instant coffee powder to the recipe.  Originating from different continents – the Americas and Africa – but cacao and coffee are remarkably comparable in the way they are harvested, processed, and consumed.  As beans out of the pods, both are fermented, dried, toasted, and finally ground to be brewed into drinks.  Both tasting powerful and bitter, it makes sense that they compliment each other so well.

Instructions
Mix the sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda with the coffee and bring to a boil over medium heat.  Whisk to blend and watch it carefully as it boils to avoid spill-over.  Allow to stand in the hot saucepan for at least 10 minutes.

In a bowl, whisk the eggs until pale and frothy, then whisk in the vegetable oil, yogurt, vanilla extract, and the coffee-cocoa mixture.  Sift the flour and whisk it into the liquid mixture, ⅓ at a time.  Line two 6-in round baking pans with parchment paper well above the top edges.  45-60 minutes @ 350F.

You don’t need to pass the clean toothpick test.  A little bit of pudding makes for a fudge-like texture, which is also very nice.  Take it out of the oven about 5 minutes before fully baked to see if you prefer it.  This cake tastes better the next day, after an overnight rest in the fridge.  It freezes very well.

There are multiple recipes for chocolate ganache frosting, the simplest employing just 8 oz of chocolate chips to 1 cup of heavy cream. But I like this one from Shirley Corriher because it is beautifully velvety, glossy, and smooth.  Only that it is very sweet.  I have swapped out the semisweet for bittersweet chocolate chips, and it still works.  I may try to reduce the amount of sugar by half, or just rid the sugar all together, to see if I prefer it.

To use apricot jam, ensure it is the smooth kind, since you don’t want a lumpy chocolate ganache.  Bring everything, except for the chocolate chips, to a boil in a saucepan over medium heat.  Then turn off the heat and spread the chocolate chips evenly into the liquid.  Lid the saucepan and let it stand for 2 minutes.  Then open the lid to gently whisk the chocolate into the cream mixture, from the center outward, until smooth.  Adding the chocolate into the hot cream ensures that it will not seize, which is when the chocolate becomes grainy instead of blending smoothly into the liquid.  This amount of ganache is more than sufficient to double glaze two 6-inch round chocolate cakes.  Leftover ganache freezes well and is delicious on chocolate ice cream.