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at Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:52:56 GMT in
>,
(Elitsirk) wrote :

>I've been on a hunt for a rich, moist chocolate cake recipe. At
>various restaurants, I've had rich, dark, moist cakes, but the closest
>home version I can find is a Duncan Hines devils' food cake.
>
>Does anyone have a from-scratch recipe?

This recipe is for the cake portion of "Chocolate Death", my ultimate
chocolate cake recipe that I posted some time back. It's hard to go wrong
with this one.

Chocolate cake

8 oz. 70%-type bittersweet chocolate (Guittard Bittersweet recommended)
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup flour
8 tbsp butter
4 eggs
1/3 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350F. Thoroughly grease and flour a 9" cake pan.
Separate the eggs into yolks and whites. Cut up the butter
and allow to soften a bit. Bring the water to a simmer, and in it melt the
chocolate over low heat (that's right - *in* the water). Remove from the
heat and stir in the egg yolks one at a time. Add the sugar and butter
and mix well. Once everything has melted, stir in the flour. Whip the egg
whites into stiff peaks and fold in. Pour into the prepared pan and bake at
350F for 45-50 minutes, testing carefully to avoid scorching. Remove and
cool.

>Or at least a guide for what
>to look for in a chocolate cake recipe (i.e. cocoa vs chocolate,
>presence/absence of things like sour cream, etc)?

Now, let me give a bit of a guide on identifying what to look for. I can
use the recipe above for examples.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that it's not a question of
which ingredients are in a recipe, or even how much of a main ingredient
there is, but rather of proportions and method. As a result, you have to
look at the relative amounts of ingredients instead of the absolute
amounts. This takes some experience and practice. It helps to have an
awareness of what different ingredients do, and in what direction they lean
a recipe.

Flour lends structure, while weakening the overall intensity of flavour and
drying out the result. Low-protein flour (pastry flour) will make a cake
considerably lighter and drier. High-protein flour will make it denser and
moister, and also more sturdy.

Sugar also contributes to structure, and will make the cake somewhat
chewier and more springy. It tends to lean a cake away from the crumbly
side and towards the gummy side. Obviously, it makes it sweeter. Brown
sugar will make a cake moister and deeper in flavour, and the darker the
sugar the stronger this effect. Liquid sugars will make for a very smooth
texture. You have to be careful with honey because enzyme reactions can
destroy the texture altogether - a real mess! The key point with honey is
not to overdo it.

Butter makes a cake denser and richer, as well as browning the outside.
It's key also to keeping a cake moist.

Vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco) makes a cake much lighter and airier.
Cakes made with shortening almost never taste as rich as those made with
butter, and there's often a bit of a strange pastiness to them.

Liquid oils make a cake very tender indeed, and generally quite light. Some
oils (olive, hazelnut, sesame) have very strong flavours which you must use
with caution.

Eggs will make a cake lighter and puffier. Too few, however, and your cake
turns towards brownie, and ultimately to cookie. Yolks alone will make a
cake somewhat richer and more silken, whites alone will make a cake very
light and springy.

Chocolate makes a cake much denser and generally drier. It also makes the
texture smooth and silken. Cocoa, OTOH, will always make a cake drier and
crumblier, as well as lighter. Clearly, both will add intensity of flavour.
There are many variables here. Sweetened chocolate will add flavour in
proportion to its cocoa percentage - high-percentage chocolates at 70% will
add a lot of flavour, low-percentage at 50% will contribute much less.
Cocoa adds a lot of flavour whack for little addition, but will give a
harsher taste relative to chocolate and the cake will always taste of
cocoa, not chocolate. "Dutch-processed" cocoa, as well as chocolate, will
make any cake much darker, almost black, but paradoxically with a milder
flavour and a characteristic metallic twang. It's crucial to use the best
quality chocolate or cocoa you can find. Much "baking chocolate" - the
blocks that Bakers', Hershey's, and Nestle sell, is worthless and you
shouldn't use them at all. Don't believe that a good recipe will hide a bad
chocolate - it's rather the reverse: a bad chocolate can spoil a good
recipe. Better to get a quality brand like Ghirardelli, Callebaut, or
Guittard. Finally, chocolate chips will almost always make a cake drier and
leaning towards a cocoa texture, but without the powerful flavour cocoa
provides; rather, the flavour will be mild.

Most of the "white dairy" products, e.g. milk, cream, sour cream, etc. make
a cake very tender. Sometimes the acid in the cultured members such as
buttermilk, sour cream, and yogurt is necessary to react with leavening
agents like baking soda.

Cakes that use chemical leavening such as baking soda or baking powder will
be generally somewhat light, but rarely as light as those that use air-
leavening (generally, from beaten egg whites), which can be very light
indeed, if the volume of egg white is large. If there's neither beaten egg
white nor any kind of chemical leavening, the resulting cake will be very
dense (e.g. pound cake).

Now, on to method. As I just said, if a recipe calls for beaten egg whites,
it's usually going to be quite light. However, to some degree, this depends
on how much egg white there is. Really large volumes of egg white almost
always signal a very light, airy cake, but small volumes (such as, for
instance, 3 egg whites for 2 cups of flour) don't necessarily indicate
this. If the recipe calls for yolks to be beaten along with the whites,
then the cake will usually be considerably denser. Some recipes ask for
yolks to be beaten separately. This is for the lightest cakes of all,
especially the sponge-cake family which are all very low density.

If you beat sugar in with the whites, it stabilizes the mixture
considerably so that there will be less deflation, and a lighter cake, when
this mixture gets blended with everything else.

When egg whites are beaten, they are to be folded in (that is, you take a
spatula and lightly draw the other parts of the mix over the egg whites in
a scooping, sweeping motion). One question here concerns what is to be
folded into what. If the recipe asks that the whites be folded with melted
chocolate first, it'll be denser than one that folds flour in first. If
chocolate and flour are mixed together first, then the whole folded in, it
will be lightest of the 3. The key point: folding melted chocolate directly
into egg whites causes a lot of deflation. The more things dilute the
chocolate, the less deflation. Cocoa, by contrast, does not deflate egg
whites.

Most recipes will ask you to cream the butter. If you don't cream butter,
cakes will usually be extremely dense, often leaden and brick-like. It's
not necessary to cream vegetable shortening. A very few recipes will call
for melted butter, usually in small amounts. As you discovered, this will
lean the texture towards that of a brownie.

Recipes that ask you to stir most of the ingredients together tend to
emphasize robust structure over tenderness or lightness. Ones that mix
things in carefully, in stages, and with different, sometimes seemingly
bizarre, specific methods of incorporation usually come out more tender and
lighter.

Higher oven temperatures, around 425F and above, generally emphasize
exteriour browning. They will make the cake drier on the outside, and
moister in the middle for a time, but then suddenly everything will dry out
completely. If the recipe starts at a high temperature but then decreases
it, the goal is often to set a crucial ingredient, usually eggs. If you
started such recipes at a lower temperature, they tend to lose volume, or
worse still, separate and become uneven (the usual result: a dense, greasy
buttery layer on the bottom, a light, dry, eggy layer on top) Also, high
temperatures create many more problems with cake "doming" - the effect
where the center rises much more than the edges.

Moderate oven temperatures, around 350F, usually allow for moist cakes with
a uniform texture throughout and a somewhat browned exteriour. The outside
will not usually be truly crisp, although it can be firm and a bit crusty.
These also can dry out if left in the oven too long. With chocolate,
there's a risk at this temperature that the chocolate will scorch, and you
must remove them before you smell anything that seems even slightly burnt.

Low oven temperatures, 325 and below, emphasize minimal doming and a tender
outside. Paradoxically, these can be very dry indeed because they require
long baking for the center to be done at all. If the cake is in a water-
bath while in the oven, this won't happen, but if not, it could well be
designed to be fairly dry. There's much less risk of chocolate scorching at
this temperature.

With all this in mind, I will "dissect" the above recipe. While this may
not be obvious without experience, the proportions of ingredients reveal
much of the secret - it's a cake absolutely *laden* with chocolate and
butter, while minimizing sugar and especially, flour. Clearly the objective
is to increase the chocolate proportion and decrease the flour proportion
as much as sanely possible, before you reach truly brownie-like
consistency. 2/3 cup of flour is a tiny amount, while 8 oz chocolate, for
that little flour, is extreme. The amount by itself isn't enough to be
conclusive - for instance, if it were 8 oz to 2 cups flour, that'd simply
be "typical", but when you see it at that ratio, it's clear that intensity
is the aim. Then you have the butter. 8 tbsp is already a lot, with those
amounts of flour and sugar, and when you add it to all that chocolate, the
direction this cake seems to be headed is towards a chocolate decadence.
Meanwhile, the number of eggs is merely that which one might find in a
"typical" butter cake - in other words, this isn't going to have sponge-
cake consistency, especially not with the levels of butter and chocolate.

Now you look at method. Unusually, the butter is to be melted. Again, it's
headed towards brownie territory. This recipe is starting to look more and
more like a chocolate decadence. And in a bizarre twist, you're melting
chocolate *in* water. The reason for this may not be clear, but I'll give
it to you: the idea is to add moisture to the cake, so that the high
chocolate proportion won't dry it out completely (extreme amounts of
chocolate risk making a cake very dry). So what's to stop this "cake" from
becoming a chocolate decadence? Reversing every other trend in the recipe,
the egg whites are to be beaten and folded in. Now this *is* a surprise.
It's rare that a recipe that's been headed denser, denser, denser, suddenly
does an about-face and goes...lighter. But here's where the larger vision
of the cake comes in to view - the objective was to densify the mix as much
as possible, up to a point where one does the most extreme thing possible
to lighten it, so that it doesn't end up as a bomb. The net result is that
the beaten egg whites lighten it just enough to keep it within the texture
range of "cake" rather than "brownie" or "decadence", while pushing the
proportions of everything to the limits of the possible. Baking at 350
keeps the uniform consistency (at this density, there aren't going to be
many problems with doming, either), so at the end you arrive at a very
moist, very chocolatey, very rich cake, perhaps as extreme as you can go.

What this recipe also illustrates is the unusual measures necessary to get
a chocolate cake that is both strongly chocolatey and quite moist, without
it becoming a brownie. The reason you have to resort to unorthodox tactics
is that the natural tendencies of the ingredients fight each other. The
problem is chocolate. In order to get lots of flavour, you have to add a
lot of chocolate. But this tends to dry out the cake. You can use cocoa,
but this only makes the drying problem worse if you do nothing else, and it
makes the cake taste of cocoa. You can increase the amount of butter to
offset the moistness problem, but this only exaggerates your density
problem. So to get around this, you use beaten egg whites, the most
powerful way of increasing volume and lightness.

>I've tried a couple of cakes (chocolate pound cake, and the basic
>chocolate cake recipe) in The Cake Bible, and they came out drier,
>with a paler color than I would have liked. (As a side note, if you
>accidentally melt the butter by adding the water/cocoa poweder mixture
>while it's still hot in the basic cake recipe, it makes decent
>brownies....).

As I hope I explained above, it's not surprising that most book recipes
come out this way, because there's a finite limit to how much chocolate you
can add to a "typical" or classic recipe before it becomes unacceptably dry
and/or dense. So the rich, moist chocolate cake requires a radical rethink
of the cake method altogether. Even expert pastry chefs have limits on
their time, creativity, and ingenuity, and they may stumble across a magic
formula, but generally it's going to take someone unusually obsessed with
chocolate to concoct a chocolate cake recipe that is really chocolatey and
really moist at the same time.

--
Alex Rast

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