This could be a long, intense instructional post about how to make a simple, intense chocolate cake with a grown-up, unexpected twist. And, knowing me, there’d be all this deep-like stuff about birthdays and the passage of time, but hopefully with no cloying sentimentality.
As it happens, my time has been limited lately—more festivals to photograph, road trips to go on, new horizons to study, die deutsche Sprache zu üben, und ich meine wirklich hart. So, here’s the short and sweet. And here’s why that last sentence was funny: my hot tip concerns a way to make the standard chocolate cake emphatically less sweet than the usual. Interested? I’ll go on.
Bake any chocolate cake that works as a layer cake. Mine has plain wheat or spelt flour, a mix of brown and white sugars, a neutral oil, some yogurt, a few eggs, Valrhona cocoa dissolved in hot water, vanilla, baking soda, and salt. Usually instead of vanilla I like lavender—some ground with the flour, some steeped in the water I use to dissolve the cocoa. Earl Grey or black coffee work, too. Two layers are fine, three are better, four are extra-luxuriant and actually quite difficult to assemble. You can use separate baking tins or bake in one and slice crosswise. You can even bake one big sheet pan and cut out the rounds, piecing some together from half-rounds or other shapes as needed. (This I think is either from Momofuku or Ottolenghi, a great solution that also eliminates the doming that makes cake assembly so tricky.) However you approach this, frosting and stacking a picture-worthy layer cake is hard, but frosting and stacking a delicious one that looks messy is easy.
If you’ve baked a very moist cake, you’re fine, but if it feels firm or seems dry, soak it. Most recipes call for a syrup, but cake is already sweet, so I just use more of whatever I used to dilute the cocoa—lavender infusion, coffee, tea. I apply it by the spoonful once each layer is on its own parchment-lined base, ready for stacking.
And now the interesting part. My go-to frosting for chocolate cakes has been a simple 1-to-1 cream-based ganache, which I’ve whipped after allowing it to set. For years I made this with a dark chocolate in the sixty- to seventy-percent cocoa solids range. And then I made it with some of that 99% practically unsweetened all-dark chocolate because it was all I had in the house—and it turned out to be a revelation. You can infuse the cream however you like, or add orange oil or vanilla or anything else that sounds good, including of course that fat pinch of salt that’s always obligatory. Whatever you do, just allow that grown-up intensity of cacao to melt into the soothing softness of cream without any interference from sugar. The way those classic cake layers play with this unexpected ganache is already a wish come true.
That’s all I’ve got for now. The cake is from Anker’s birthday last week. He had wanted a lemon cake with whipped cream but I asked to make this one and all was well in the end, since I also made a lemon tart on the side.