Thanks for your recipe. I think I may try it in a few days.
You are so knowledgeable about this, (after reading your information below)
that I feel I can ask you this question.

You recommended 70% bittersweet chocolate. I have in my pantry 62%
Scharffen Berger bittersweet pure dark chocolate, a 70% Scharffen Berger
bittersweet pure dark chocolate. And a 99% Scharffen Berger "unsweetened"
(doesn't say "bittersweet") pure dark chocolate. I should use as you
recommended the 70%?

I notice that you do not say unsalted or salted butter. Would it make a
difference in this recipe? I have both on hand. My salted butter is Amish,
and my unsalted is just typical from Costco.

I'm curious as to the "baking powder" or "baking soda," as I'm not quite
sure, having not made many cakes in my life, does this recipe not need a
baking powder or soda, but most cakes do?

I am going to use all-purpose flour in this recipe, as I don't use cake
flour because it is all bleached. I take it that the flour called for in
this recipe is all-purpose? I hope so. I prefer it to cake flour.

I'm glad your recipe didn't include chocolate chips.

Thanks for your extra comments with your recipe, I really appreciate them.

Dee





"Alex Rast" > wrote in message
...
> 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
>
> (remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)