The Ultimate Chocolate Cake with Erin McDowell

the ultimate chocolate cake devil's food cake chocolate pudding whipped ganache basic chocolate glaze and tons of chocolate sprinkles it does not get any chocolaty Olaf endless [Music] hi I'm Aaron J McDowell and today we are making my ultimate chocolate cake recipe it is so good it is chocolate on chocolate on chocolate on more chocolate and we're gonna make it right now to get started with this cake I like to start by putting some boiling water over the cocoa powder this is something you see in a lot of cake recipes and it's because warming up the cocoa powder sort of brings out that chocolatey flavor even more so cake batters don't ever like when you put too extreme temperatures together that's why it's so important to use room-temperature butter or room temperature eggs all that kind of business so I also after I put in the boiling water I also add some milk to it and the milk helps bring the temperature back down so that we don't have to wait for it to cool forever we can get to cake faster which is very important here just a couple good whisks really make sure you get into the bottom so that there's not any kind of chunky pieces hiding and then we'll just set that aside until we're ready to use it and now I'm gonna turn to my mixer here and we're gonna start with 9 ounces of butter butter my favorites the butter ring with a brass knuckle but four bakers so I've got nine ounces of butter and I've got three cups of sugar that sounds like a lot but this is a really really big cake and this is also a great cake for making for a big soiree big party because this amount of sugar helps keep the cake really moist so even if you want to make the cake two days ahead of your party it's still gonna be really sticky and gooey I'll start by mixing that the butter is at room temperature and we're just gonna cream this doesn't just mean mix the butter and sugar to combine it also is adding aeration to the batter so it's really important that the color of this goes from sort of a pale yellow color to an almost white color so I'm gonna go ahead and add my vanilla you can skip vanilla in a chocolate cake recipe but there are certain flavors that make chocolate taste even more chocolaty so vanilla really does that and coffee also does that so sometimes I even suggest to people instead of using boiling water for this first step you can actually use a hot cup of coffee so I'm gonna start adding the eggs one at a time a lot of recipes say to do this and people always ask me why why can't if it only has two eggs why can't I just add both eggs at the same time you have to almost think of your cake batter as an emulsion if you add too much of any ingredient at any given time you're breaking the emulsion so we like to just add one egg at a time even if there's only two but especially in a recipe like this where there's five eggs I just dumped these all in here we're gonna probably break the cake batter this cake recipe rises totally flat one of the main ways that it won't rise evenly is if it isn't evenly and you can see that the batter looks relatively smooth and actually look a little bit like it did at the end of creaming just a little bit softener so now I'm going to start alternating editions of this cocoa mixture from before I love me a pour spout and my dry ingredients my dry ingredients I have all-purpose flour salt baking soda and baking powder and you know if you just dump this all into a mixer and mix it up they would probably still turn out pretty delicious but if you take the time like this the crumb structure of the finished cake is like a little bit smoother and when you like put your fork in it oh my gosh I can't wait to eat this cake you can also kind of do this last mixing by hand if you want just to make sure you don't risk over mixing it and there is our beautiful chocolate batter hmm I would just eat this with a spoon if we didn't need to make the cake but we'll proceed i greased these with nonstick spray and now I'm gonna put some cocoa powder in it you can also use flour for this but I really like to use cocoa powder for a cake that's this deeply chocolatey because any remnants on the outside of the cake will look chocalate instead of looking like flowery best so then you want to go around the sides the whole thing gets coated this is especially important on this cake because we're gonna do a naked style cake where there's very little frosting on the outside so if there was any like little flowery bits we really wouldn't want to see those I'm going to use an ice cream scoop to help me divvy up the batter between them you're just gonna want to remember the number of scoops that you do and I usually start by doing ten scoops in each one because we're doing a naked cake we really want the layers to look even here so can you just eyeball it and pour it into the pans absolutely totally fine but just one of the ways that we're gonna make it look a little bit nicer kind of the pro tips okay and then I like to just it just helps get it flattened out it'll do the rest of the flattening out in the oven so now we're gonna bake them at 350 for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the very center comes out clean all right so I told you this cake is chocolate on chocolate on chocolate on chocolate the next chocolate element is a chocolate pudding filling it starts with some milk and cream because milk just isn't enough we've got to add a little cream in there too so I'm just putting it over a medium heat sort of start to warm up this cream and I'm gonna add both unsweetened and some bittersweet chocolate to it the reason that I'm using a combination here is because the unsweetened really helps make this a really deeply chocolate without being overly sweet you do want to make sure you kind of keep it constantly in motion in these early stages because chocolate does have a tendency to want to burn so you don't want to let it sit at the bottom of the pot for too long and we're just going to stir this until the chocolate melts completely and then we'll move on to our next part of making the pudding puddings are thickened both with a little bit of egg and also with a little bit of cornstarch not every recipe but this recipe is when you use cornstarch people have all sorts of ways of preventing the cornstarch from clumping this is my way and I think it's the easiest so I'm biased this is granulated sugar and we add the cornstarch to the granulated sugar first the granules of the sugar sort of break up the cornstarch and prevent it from clumping it's a great tip really helps I'm also gonna add a pinch of salt cuz salts with chocolate is always really good now the net last thing I'm gonna add to this until later are the egg yolks but I don't want to add those until I'm ready to go because sugar is hygroscopic that means it sucks moisture out of things so there's sort of an old wives tale that if you put sugar on eggs and cooks them that isn't exactly true but what it does is it sucks the moisture out of them causing the egg yolk to dry out it sort of looks coagulated it looks like it's cooked so we just don't want to add our egg yolks until we're pretty much ready to go with the next step of the recipe because we could end up with kind of some firm chunky egg yolks so I'm gonna go back and get my milk a stir my milk and cream and chocolate now that my chocolate milk cream mixture is hot I'm gonna go ahead and add my egg yolks and whisk them into this mixture it's okay if it's not totally smooth because it's all gonna come together when I add the warm liquid here but just kind of start the process of mixing I'm gonna add about a third of this while whisking constantly and you just want to whisk really vigorously at first to make sure that all that egg breaks up so I'm gonna put the rest of it back on the stovetop and now I'm gonna take this guy that I whisked over to the stovetop too I'm gonna pour it back into the pot while whisking constantly again we just basically want to be agitating it so that we don't get any bits of egg or cornstarch that are unhappy we want everyone to get into this nice and smooth so I'm gonna start heating it again and I'm gonna start with the whisk so it's starting to thicken just a little bit so I'm gonna go ahead and switch to my spatula for the rest of the cook time just so I can make sure that I'm we're really getting into those edges and corners of the pot so we don't just want it to be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon we want it to be thick enough that it actually comes to what I learned is called first boil and first boil isn't necessarily just a couple of bubbles around the outside of the pot which is more like a simmer first boil is when we get a nice big fat bubble coming up from the center of the pot and we do that because there is something that naturally exists in that consumes starch this favorite breakfast so if you don't cook the eggs to a high enough temperature that enzyme stays in the egg and your custard will look really nice and thick it'll look beautiful and then you'll put it in the fridge to cool and when you come back to it it'll be runny and it's because that enzyme was having a feast in the fridge but all you have to do to prevent that from happening is make sure you bring it to first boil and as it thickens this last little bit I'll just stop every now and then to see oh there are those bubbles there's the big fat bubble yes heat is off ladies and gentlemen we have just murdered an enzyme so once we get that bubble we want to take it off the heat and I'm gonna mix in two tablespoons of butter and some vanilla the butter gives it this like really silky luxurious texture you don't want to add vanilla extract to things when you're cooking them for a long time because a lot of the flavor kind of goes away so it's really great to add it at the end of something that cooks like this so now this is ready to be strained if we want we'll cover it directly with plastic wrap put it in the fridge until it cools completely so we've got two more components to make for our ultimate chocolate cake two kinds of ganache because one just isn't enough when we're talking lifted it so ganache is incredibly versatile we're gonna make a whipped ganache and we're also going to make our chocolate glaze which is a little bit more of a thick drippy sort of ganache they're both cream and chocolate the only difference is the ratio so for the whipped ganache it has a bit more cream to chocolate ratio because later we're gonna whip it in the mixer and aerate it a little bit just makes it really light and fluffy the other the chocolate glaze we want it to be thick so that it slowly drips down the cake so it has a lower ratio of cream to it so we'll start by making the whipped ganache because it has to set for a little while cool off before we can whip it I don't want to recommend using chocolate chips here because chocolate chips have a stabilizer in them that helps them keep their shape even after they've been baked so in a situation like this where you're trying to melt it you also often make it really really difficult to actually get it melted and uniform so it's better to go with your bar chocolate here chop it up these are both bittersweet chocolates they would be fine to use semi-sweet if you prefer it but when you change the ratio the level of chocolate you often have to reduce your cream a little bit actually on food 52 I have the basic chocolate glaze with ratios for dark chocolate and milk chocolate and white chocolate so ganache is a really great way to kind of get creative with it I've chopped my chocolate pretty fine because we want the heat of the cream to be enough to actually melt this ideally if it isn't you can always pop it in the microwave for a couple of 10 second bursts stirring it to combine or if your bowl is heat safe you can put it over a bowl of simmering water just until the rest of it comes together our cream has come to a simmer so I'm gonna pour it into the chocolate this is for the whipped ganache so when I make a ganache I like to not touch it at first I actually just let it sit for a few minutes start the melting process and while it's doing that I'm gonna go ahead and pour the cream for the glaze in here so it can start warming up so after it sits for about 10-15 seconds I take my spatula and you start by mixing it just in the very center now could you just take the spatula and mix this absolutely but this is one of my favorite things in the entire food world and watching this happen so it sort of looks broken and like it's not gonna come together and then it first starts to come together just in the very center you'll see so then once it starts to do that in the very center you can start writing in your your stirrer yeah okay so this one is good in order to whip it it has to firm up a little bit so we're gonna just set it aside at room temperature and then we're just gonna let this guy boil and we'll do the same thing for our glaze and the glaze will come together a little faster because it's a little less chocolate a little less cream and then we'll start to stir and again I know this method like seems like a little extra to just be working in the middle but this is how I learned from my chocolates instructor in school and when you do it this way it's just so much less likely to break and it has the most delicious smooth texture so now we're ready to start assembling our cake and the first step is to cut our cakes in half to make two layers so we'll ultimately have a four layer chocolate cake so I have my ganache here and it's just firmed up a little bit it's not completely set but it's thicker than it was before and that just makes it a little bit easier to whip it and you see a textural difference to it was a little bit softer before and then you just start to see that the act of whipping not only aerates it but it also sort of thickens it like you can just see this texture time to build our ultimate chocolate cake now when I build layer cakes I really like to start with a piece of cake that was the bottom so just so you start off with a nice flat piece kind of right from the get-go we're using a chocolate pudding filling remember so it's nice to give a ring sort of like a ganache retaining wall on the outside of this cake so I'm gonna pipe right at the very edge a ring of this whipped ganache and it doesn't need to be perfect you're gonna see even if you need to stop you can just push back into the ganache to start again and just like that and then we're gonna do a few scoops of our pudding so I think I'll start with four scoops so I like to use the ice cream scoop for the same reason we did with the cake batter it helps you just make sure that you've got an even amount in all layers without having to mess with getting the scale out or anything like that oh my gosh I'm having a moment with this pudding you really are and it's only gonna get better one thing you don't want to do that you would do on a regular cake is like really push it out towards the edges this is a naked cake so we want to leave the sides looking pretty nice and smooth so we're just focusing on smoothing out that top and making it really even so put the next layer cake on top [Music] and then we put the final layer flat side up so we have just a nice kind of squared off top so now what we want to do is clean up some of these spots we're gonna do a thin outer layer of frosting which is sometimes called a crumb coat so I put the rest of my whip ganache into a pastry bag or back into the pastry bag and I'm just gonna kind of go around the outside edge to fill in anywhere that doesn't have enough so that basically it's flat flush with the cake all along that outside bit and then we're just gonna take our spatula again and kind of go around to press it in this is indicative of a naked cake we're kind of giving it a crumb coat which is a very thin coat of frosting where you can still see the cake layers through it so many people want a little less frosting I'm not one of those people but this cake still has a lot going on and then if you have any left you can just sort of squeeze it on top of the cake and do one kind of final thin layer right on the top and this is this top layer isn't really frosting it's more just to smooth out that surface and now we just need to refrigerate it for about 15 minutes because it makes it easier to get that nice drippy effect if the cake is cold so our cake has been chilling for about 15-20 minutes having the cake really cold is the best way to get it from here to here you're gonna want to run your big spatula all the way around the cake just to make sure that there isn't any frosting holding it down and you kind of pick it up and you just slide your hand underneath just support it and put it on and then by leaving this thing in you can basically still move it if you feel like it's not quite centered you still have the ability to move it and then you just pull that up so our final step here is to add our drippy layer and maybe I'm gonna throw in a few extra steps after the essence - just if you really want to make it fancy but adding the chocolate glaze is really the last big part and we're adding a drippy glaze so I did warm up our glaze a little bit so it's nice and fluid like this it should fall off the spoon really easily like that you just start with a pretty generous spoonful right towards the edge and then remember that your cake is chilled it is going to start to set pretty quickly so you want to put it towards the edge and then you want to use the edge of the spoon to sort of nudge that drip over and in general Kay the drips look good when there's a nice variety of lengths and sizes of drip and the warmer the glaze is the more runny it will be so once you're done you can spoon as much of the glaze as you want on top and just sort of spread it out and the cake is cold so it's gonna kind of firm up you can do a little bit more of a swoopy effect if you want now I had just a little bit of the extra whipped ganache so just to add a little extra flare to this already ultimate chocolate cake we can pipe some little decorative effects around the top and this is completely up to you if you're interested in adding a little more you could also pipe around the bottom the sky is the limit when you're working with cakes and then I have a couple different chocolate sprinkles here and I'm just gonna kind of whoo-hoo-hoo this is the fun part I mean the whole thing is the fun part but this is really the fun part because we're really close to doing it I've got some dark chocolate sprinkles and some milk chocolate sprinkles and because I created this cake to celebrate food if you choose tenth birthday I think I'm also going to add some gold sprinkles too just for a little more Flair Wow it's really beautiful and most importantly it's gonna be crazy delicious I cannot wait to eat this cake and I just love all the chocolate elements put together and I can't wait to see some of you making this crazy delicious chocolate cake [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Food52

Views: 1,686,616

Rating: 4.9301958 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, dessert, dessert recipes, chocolate cake, chocolate cake recipe, chocolate cake decoration, ultimate chocolate cake, best chocolate cake, best chocolate cake recipe, cake, cake decorating, cake recipe, cake videos, cake recipe chocolate, Erin McDowell, Fearless Baker, how to make chocolate cake, birthday cake, moist chocolate cake recipe, how to make chocolate cake at home, choclate cake, choclate cake recipe

Id: Cn-X2Ti9Xj4

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019