Published March 1, 2006.
What ever happened to those towering slices of chocolate cake slathered with billowy frosting? We baked 130 cakes in search of the perfect wedge.
Over the years, chocolate cakes have become denser, richer, and squatter. Many contemporary cakes are so intense that just a few forkfuls satisfy. These cakes taste great—it’s hard to imagine a bad chocolate cake--but sometimes we'd rather have a real piece of cake, not a fudgelike confection.
We wanted an old-style, mile-high chocolate layer cake with a tender, airy, open crumb and a soft, billowy frosting.
The mixing method was the key to getting the right texture. After trying both creaming and "reverse creaming", we turned to ribboning, a popular old-fashioned technique used for cakes like génoise (a moist, light sponge cake). Ribboning involves whipping eggs with sugar until they double in volume, then adding the butter, dry ingredients, and milk. The egg foam aerated the cake, giving it both the structure and the tenderness that neither creaming nor reverse creaming could provide. To achieve a moist cake with rich chocolate flavor, we once again looked to historical sources, which suggested using buttermilk and making a "pudding" with a mixture of chocolate, water, and sugar. We simply melted unsweetened chocolate and cocoa powder in hot water over a double boiler, then stirred in sugar until it dissolved. Turning to the frosting, we wanted to combine the best elements of classic chocolate frostings: the intense chocolate flavor of a ganache (a mixture of chocolate and cream) and the volume of a meringue or buttercream. The solution turned out to be a simple reversal of the conventional ganache procedure: we poured cold (rather than heated) cream into warm (rather than room-temperature) chocolate, waited for it to cool to room temperature, then whipped until fluffy.
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