The Only Chocolate Cake Recipe You'll Ever Need With Claire Saffitz | NYT Cooking

just going to turn on very low it's not plugged in hold for extension cord thanks these mixers I tell [Music] you hi everyone I'm Claire saffitz I am here in the nyt cooking studio for another episode of try this at home today I'm making a recipe that I feel will become part of your regular baking rotation it's really approachable this is my ideal chocolate layer cake I've made a ton of chocolate cakes in the past flow cake stbl Food you name it I've made it but I didn't really have a go-to ideal chocolate layer cake perfect for celebrations birthdays or just cuz you feel like baking and this is mine I really did a super deep dive into developing this one and decided that this is my perfect chocolate cake it's really easy to make really fun and super [Music] impressive I can be an impatient Baker but it's always so frustrating when you've made your cake batter your oven is preheated and then you realize you didn't prep your pans so I always make it a point to do that first I have here three 8 inch cake pans now these are 8 in x 2 in so it's really important that you're baking in a cake pan that has at least 2in High sides if you have one that's like a little shorter like 1 and 1/2 in you're just not going to get as sort of even and high of a rise in your layers room temp butter is really my fat of choice for greasing pans generally so I'm going to start by just brushing the bottom and side with some of this butter and also my oven is already on 350 next I'm going to line just the bottom of each pan with round of parchment paper I'll show you a really fun useful technique for cutting a round of parchment to fit any size pan going to start by actually Folding It diagonally so basically I have this folded edge here I'm just going to continue to fold it in half along that folded Edge and then in half again I'm always kind of folding it along this one point point and then once I get it to a pretty thin triangle so take the point of the parchment you're going to eyeball the very center of your cake pan and then with your scissors you're going to cut right at the edge and then go ahead and unfold it and you have this sort of nice roundish shape that is sized to fit perfectly inside your pan like that and now I like to go in and just smooth any air bubbles this is a pretty liquid batter and so with a really liquid batter sometimes you might get a little bit of batter like running underneath the parchment if it's not really flat in there so just to minimize the chances of that putting that layer of parchment in the bottom just means you'll be able to unmold them super easily you don't have to worry at all about sticking it's just a good insurance policy now this chocolate cake only has cocoa powder in it not like actual m melted chocolate and I just feel like melted chocolate sometimes firms up the texture in a way that I don't really love and I think it can even dry out a cake a little bit so with cocoa powder you just get like pure unadulterated chocolate flavor and that's what I really love so I have some Dutch processed cocoa powder right here I tested a couple different versions of this and I found that the version I liked best as far as texture was also the easiest to put together as far as mixing method so I am using a St mixer here I have the paddle attachment this is a method that is known as reverse creaming it was I think sort of like popularized by um Rose Levy Baron bom author of The Cake Bible it starts with your dry ingredients in the bowl instead of starting with your butter and sugar which is how a lot of cake recipes start if you don't have a St mixer you could do this with a hand mixer it'll just take a little bit longer cake flour whenever you are kind of moderating the amount of sugar in a baking recipe you often need to compensate by adding a little bit more salt because sugar is a flavor enhancer so the generous amount of salt it's on a typo it's important then I'm adding baking powder and baking soda the baking powder that's going to help produce this nice even rise as it bakes the baking soda that's going to give the cake like a super light texture if you are an experienced Baker you might think to yourself but sugar is not actually a dry ingredient it's a wet ingredient and that is true but for this mixing method it actually goes in with the dry so I'm just going to turn this in a little with speed to combine all these ingredients this is so crucial but I do like to distribute that leavening a little bit in the very beginning so the next step is called blooming the cocoa powder the blooming refers to sort of like the way that the flavor kind of comes out and enhances I'm using 3/4 of a cup of hot freshly brewed coffee coffee and chocolate match made in heaven the coffee adds like the liquid that we need for the recipe but also that bitterness tends to really enhance that chocolate flavor so so this is hot you want to make sure it's hot add it to my cocoa powder if your cocoa powder seems really lumpy go ahead and sift it first but you generally can smooth that any lumps at this stage already it's like so fragrant I get this incredible chocolate Aroma and the creme fresh adds Tang so it's not only there for flavor but that the acid because it is a culture dairy product it is going to then react with that baking soda that I added and create this really light texture ditto with the coffee coffee is acidic so that's going to react sour cream is a great substitute so you can go ahead and use sour cream I wouldn't use Greek yogurt cuz it doesn't have as much fat vanilla extract it almost has this like velvety luxurious texture this is a pretty egg Heavy recipe eggs are so important in baking they're going to add moisture and also structure I'm using five large eggs I'm also adding two extra yolks the yolks are there for rich n it's an emulsifier so it's keeping everything B together I'm whisking this together because the eggs go in a sort of the last addition I just want it to be really well combined especially with really fresh eggs the white wants to like really hold together and resists kind of breaking up okay so now we're going to start mixing the oil that I'm using is avocado oil you just want to use any neutral oil half of this cocoa mixture and I want to mix until everything is well Incorporated all of the flour is mixed into those liquid ingredients then I'm going to increase the speed and beat it until I get something that looks really homogeneous right now it looks a little bit like shiny like the oil hasn't really absorbed with reverse creaming with this mixing method for the cake it's it's not really like the more traditional mixing method where you're creaming the butter and sugar you're adding the eggs and then you're adding the wet and dry alternating it's more actually about the timing and you'll never hear me say that like pay attention to the time and not the indicators but there's just not a lot visually that's happening here with reverse creaming because we're using cake flour and because I've added all that fat first there's really a very low risk of over mixing you'll almost never over mix it to the point where like you're going to then develop enough gluten to make the cake tough it just doesn't happen with this method which is why I really like it my remaining cocoa mixture and my eggs the eggs go in and the second part of the mixing process proc not because they have to be last just because it starts with liquid and fat they just go last in line turn this on and then kind of slowly work up to medium I'm going to continue to beat this until it's going to be super glossy and kind of the consistency of pancake batter okay this looks so good I do think it looks sort of smoother and just more homogeneous and better combined than it did in the beginning even though it's a pretty liquid batter you'll still get a little bit of unincorporated more oily bits of flour from that first mix and what happens is when you go to fill your pans and you scrape that into the bowl then you get like a sort of greasy layer on top because of that unincorporated fat so I'm just going to scrape down and around the sides so now we're ready to fill our pans this is why you want your oven preheated because we want to get these into the oven pretty quickly I do like to weigh my batter to make sure I'm Distributing it evenly between all three pans so for this recipe it's about 550 g per cake pan 548 [Music] [Music] 550 so I think I'm going to put one up here and then two down below all right 20 minutes okay oh it smells so good so my 20- Minute Timer went off I'm going to rotate the pans you can see the centers are still pretty liquid but the top one is a little more done because it's getting that heat from the top of the oven I'm going to rotate these two guys put this one up here try to be gentle and then this guy's going to come over that guy will go down there I just thought I should have put the two on the top hold on I'm changing what I did that was so stupid this guy should go up here you know what I mean why did I only put one on the top this guy should be here and that guy should be over there and then this guy's in the middle there we go okay that was much smarter okay sorry okay that's how it should be the timer went off they went actually just a minute or two over that 30 minute Mark so this is one of those things where it's like do look at the indicator not just the time I know it's done because the top is lightly cracked it's nice and springy and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean so while those cool we'll make the frosting the frosting for this cake is so good it's actually a little bit of an unusual style of buttercream it's based on what's called German buttercream which is where you basically cook this very like thick putting like mixture and whipped butter into that so that is opposed to other styles of European buttercream which are based on mering so it's just this kind of like Goldilocks chocolate frosting that's like super rich but also kind of light not overwhelming to start by chopping my chocolate chocolate in that 60 to 65% cacao range is really ideal because it has good bitterness it's not too bitter and it also is more stable sometimes when you get into like 70% and over it just leads to things kind of breaking and you get like fat separation you don't want that because there is so much chocolate in it you want to use something good quality so it's like you can find pretty decent bar chocolate at most grocery stores definitely pay attention to that cacao percentage so I'm going to start by combining the milk granulated sugar so about half of it going to go into there and the other half is going to go into this medium Bowl I want to bring this up to just even the barest simmer swirl it once or twice as it warms up to dissolve that Sugar the cocoa there is just to add a little bit of bitterness and of course like more intense chocolate flavor to help just balance everything out a nice generous amount of salt because it just brings out the flavor of the chocolate it's not like it tastes noticeably salty I'm using flour for a very specific reason it was important to me in developing this recipe that both the cake and the frosting freeze really well sometimes with cake making cuz it's like tied to an event you need that flexibility of being able to freeze it if I were to use corn starch what happens when you freeze something that's corn starch based is you get like a separation like the liquid kind of leaks out and you you lose that smooth texture the flour doesn't have that problem so I did do a test where I froze the frosting and it freezes so well it thought out I barely needed to like re-whip it at all it just basically maintained that smooth texture so gives you that flexibility now this mixture at first is really really thick and it's going to seem like there's way too much of those dry ingredients to incorporate into those yolks but just keep mixing it it will thin out a little bit okay so here is that egg mixture it's a little lighter in color now I'm going to move on to that tempering step so tempering is where you add a little bit of a hot liquid to your egg mixture and that is going to gradually raise the temperature so that when I put it back in the saucepan and cook it I don't chock the eggs and they don't curdle so I'm going to whisk in about half of the milk mixture slowly because it is quite thick and so you want to loosen it up a little so I'm going to make sure that's really thoroughly Incorporated ated I'm going to whisk this back into my saucepan so now everything is in here and I want to cook my pudding so I'm going to put it over medium heat or so I'm just going to whisk it constantly really also trying to get into those crevices inside the saucepan and because we heated up that milk and then tempered the eggs it's already pretty hot so it shouldn't take too long to thicken all of those bubbles will subside it'll hold the marks of the Whisk it'll look glossy and thick it'll just look like pudding now it's important in this step that we're really cooking out that flour so that it doesn't have any kind of like starchy consistency it is thickening and it's starting to hold the marks of the Whisk so this point definitely don't walk away so I'm going to stop whisking for a couple seconds and just look for some bubbling underneath n that's what you want so now I can take it off the heat I'm going to add the chopped chocolate fold it together just so that the chocolate gets Incorporated the heat from the pudding will gently and slowly melt the chocolate so we'll come back here in like 5 minutes so the pudding has been sitting for several minutes so at the moment it looks a little crazy it's not smooth doesn't look like this is going to make a delicious frosting but it is turn it on low medium low you'll see that melted chocolate will fully incorporate it's going to become nice and glossy so we just have to let this hang out for a little bit and then we'll start making our frosting so the pudding has cooled to room temp you do want to wait until this cools to room temp because if there's even a little bit of heat left in your pudding when you go to add the butter especially cuz the butter is room temp it will just kind of melt and that's okay you'll get kind of a looser thinner consistency of your frosting and then all you have to do is kind of chill it until it firms up but it's just easier to kind of get it all in one go vanilla extract just going to beat that in and then I'm going to start to add my butter a piece or two at a time so I'm just going to keep adding the butter slowly blend it in to your pudding base so is my last piece of [Music] butter this is looking great it is really well mixed but I do want to scrape down the sides of the bowl so there's some of that like pudding mixture kind of stuck around the bottom and Sid I let to just get that incorporated beat it once more just until it's totally smooth okay so I think we're there the frosting is like thick and spreadable and glossy and beautiful and if you wanted to pipe this it's like a great piping frosting it looks so good so now we're at the exciting part which is assembly my cake layers are completely cooled they're still in the cake pans fortunately they baked really pretty flat so so if your cake layers are this flat you could just go ahead and start assembling this one has a little bit more of a dome so I'm going to show you how to level that going to start by just cutting around the sides of the pan these pulled away from the sides of the cake pan nicely invert it onto my wire rack like so all right so go ahead and peel that off and now I'm going to reinert it onto my cutting board you could just reinert it onto another wire rack just anything that's flat on your work surface so there you go you do want to use a serrated knife start maybe about a/2 in in from the edge and then I just sort of do short little strokes what I really focus on is keeping the knife level and flat so once you cut into the layer you can almost just kind of let the knife rest on that cut surface of the cake and go around as I'm also cutting through so just make sure you're not tilting the knife this way or this way even if I have just a slight Dome I like to level the layers for a couple reasons one even a slight Dome can kind of mess up your assembly you really do want it to be flat and two you get to taste the cake scraps so that's a really important part of baking so that's just what you get as the cook that's the first layer I'll just show you that one more time just so you can see holding my knife level for this one I really only have to take off a very slight amount this one honestly just baked a little bit more to one side and that's also not uncommon if you had it on the rack where it was like off to the side so it's going to get like more heat from one side set faster the other side's going to maybe bake a little bit taller and then last one okay I have a cake stand here you could use a large dinner plate a platter or even like a cardboard cake round that's really helpful if you want to transport the cake so I'm going to start start by taking a little just like teaspoon siiz dab of frosting putting in the center of my platter I have four strips of parchment paper here that I cut this is just useful for keeping that serving platter cake stand plate whatever clean while you're frosting so I'm setting them on four sides leaving the center open I'm going to take a layer and I'm going to start by putting it cutsside down and that is because when you cut the layer to level it you expose the crumb and it's the crumb that when you go over it with the frosting is going to like sort of start to fall apart a little bit and it just can Mar the frosting and it gets like mixed in with the frosting and it doesn't look great so Cuts side down so now I'm going to take about a cup of frosting and scrape it into the center of this layer and just start to smooth it in an even layer all the way to the sides so I'm going to go right to the edge okay now the next layer is going to go on top and again I'm going to flip it over so I'm going cut side down so here I'm going to make sure that it's nicely centered move it over a little bit and then I'll spin it to make sure okay that looks good then another cup on top so same thing just spreading this all the way to the edges the third layer goes on top same thing Cuts side down okay okay that looks good there is a step that I really recommend for most styles of layer cake and that is something called a crumb coat and that is where I'm going to do a base layer of frosting across the entire surface of the cake top and sides that layer of frosting is going to take any loose crumbs like this little crumb here and this crumb here and anything on the surface and it's going to Slick it to the side of the cake so that when we put the final layer of frosting on I don't get any crumbs mixing in with the frosting and I just get this like beautiful smooth finish another cup or so just straight on top I think it's best to apply the frosting to the top and then work it down the sides the crumb coat is not a thick layer at all it is basically as thin a layer as you can possibly make so the cake will show through in places and that's what you want you just want like the barest layer of frosting and now I can start to work it down and around the cake this looks great with the crumb coat you want to chill it a little bit so when you put this in the fridge even for 5 minutes what happens is that very outer layer of frosting which is butter based is going to firm up and harden a little bit and that's just going to make it easiest to apply that final layer of frosting so I'm going to just pop this in the fridge for 5 minutes or so I'm going to grab the cake from the fridge icing it's nicely set so as a general rule when you are frosting a cake it is easier to remove frosting than it is to apply more I'm going to basically take everything that I have left which is still a generous amount and put it on top and then you can always remove it I don't go for like a super smooth application I like to make Swirls and little divots and that kind of [Music] thing so now that I have a really pretty even application of frosting everywhere I can either smooth it I can create texture sometimes I like to do a look that's like a little brush strokey creating a little bit of pattern in the frosting I just like this look because it's kind of easy you're not going for Perfection here so it's kind of like the Messier you are the better in a sense sometimes I have to be told not to touch it too much because I get in a place where I just like endlessly run over the same areas and that's not necessarily a good thing I think once you like it stop touching it that said I'm going to go over it one more time just around the edge to clean up the very top okay I'm stopping I'm stopping this should probably chill again just for 5 minutes a quick trip into the fridge just to set the frosting I can slide my pieces of parchment out from under so you get this like really beautiful finish and no frosting smears on your plate nothing to see nothing to see okay there we go wait at the top give it a [Music] sorry it looks so good I think it's a really nice proportion of frosting to cake this is what I want chocolate cake to be it's so chocy but not in a way that's overwhelming the texture of this cake is so pleasing and a lot of that is from the cake flour it is so tender but it still has like a little bit of a bounce which I want it's just really good that frosting it's rich but it's light it has the density of pudding but also kind of the texture of buttercream and it's so complimentary to the cake it's like I want a bite that as both they're so good this is my Goldilocks chocolate cake I want it to be rich a little fudgy but I want it to be also light and tender I want the frosting to be super chocolatey but not overwhelming not too buttery so if you haven't made a layer cake before I highly recommend you start with this recipe I really do hope you try this at home so you can find this recipe plus everything else I've made in this series and thousands more recipes at nyt [Music] [Applause] [Music] cooking

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 1,242,138

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, claire saffitz, chocolate cake

Id: Oz3jorq9QKY

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023