How to make a fast chocolate cake part 3

Tuesday 9th October 2011, Recipe 20111009

How to make a fast chocolate cake part 3 – an introduction

I hope you would have read my spin on Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse and how I had converted it into a fast chocolate cake. I have been carrying out more experiments and in the last article I mentioned the difficulties you would face when making this type of chocolate cake. In this article I have improved upon this type of chocolate cake and it is almost like a sponge cake. The baking time is longer, 30 minutes at a lower temperature of 180C (356F).
I have tackled some of the difficulties associated with making chocolate cake as mentioned in the previous article. And I have used the original expensive butter and it did make a difference to the chocolate mousse. I am still using the second brand of cocoa powder that began to weep so that I can learn how to control this.

 

There are three experiments here, within this one recipe.

i. Using an expensive brand of butter to show that weeping can be prevented.

In the first fast chocolate cake recipe I had figured that by using more butter the chocolate mousse would not weep. In the second experiment I had changed the brand of cocoa powder and butter and for the same recipe the chocolate mousse began to weep. By going back to the original expensive brand of butter I managed to prevent the chocolate mousse from weeping but it was very low viscosity chocolate mousse. A little wet and not like a gel. This indicated to me that the type or brand of cocoa powder does play an important role forming a gel.

 

ii. Reducing large bubble formation in the chocolate cake

The large bubbles formed during whisking can form ugly scares and deform the top surface of the chocolate cake. In this experiment I prevented the formation of most of the large bubbles.

 

iii. Getting the chocolate cake to bake uniformly

The cake was ‘humping’ during the bake. I mean it formed a huge hump that is the cake top surface was not flat or mildly curved. It formed a huge cone shape top surface. This is a waste if you plan to do some icing as you would need to cut this hump off before icing the cake. The humping is caused by the fact that the cake exterior, especially along the baking tray, bakes solid while the inside is still uncooked and wet. The solid part of the cake cannot rise any further but the inner part of the cake can keep rising. One way to control this is to lower the baking temperature. This will allow the inside of the chocolate cake to come up to temperature before the outer parts of the chocolate cake solidify, thereby the whole cake rises together. I had lowered the temperature to 180C (356F) to achieve this.

Another potential solution is to use less baking soda. This I did not try. An alternative solution is to make the cake less moist so that the cake behaves more like baking bread. The less water in the cake the quicker the heat is transmitted throughout the chocolate cake and it bakes more uniformly.

 

 

Chocolate Cake Recipe

Chocolate Cake
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
1	Cocoa Powder	100	75	2.64
2	Bread Flour	50	75	2.64
3	Self-Raising Flour	50	75	2.64
	Flour subtotal	100	150	5.28
4	Sugar (Chcocolate)	130	97.5	3.43
	Sugar (Cake)	10	15	0.53
	Sugar Subtotal		112.5	3.96
5	Butter (Chocolate)	30	22.5	0.79
	Butter (Cake)	60	90	3.17
	Butter Subtotal		112.5	3.96
6	Cocoa Butter (Chocolate)	100	75	2.64
7	Water (Chocolate)	100	75	2.64
8	Milk Powder	6	9	0.32
9	Eggs (Chocolate)	100	75	2.64
	Eggs (Cake)	100	150	5.28
	Eggs Subtotal		225	7.92
10	Salt	1	1.5	0.05
11	Vanilla	4	6	0.21
12	Baking Soda (Bread Flour)	4	3	0.11

You will notice that I am using high absorbency bread floor so that the water and oils or butter will not leak out of the cake during baking. The bread flour did not affect the flavour of the chocolate cake and it di taste like cake and not bread. What was wonderful about this recipe was that the final cake was almost like a sponge cake.

 

 

Photos of chocolate cake making process

Weigh the butters, sugar, and the soluble or ‘soft low temperature melting point’ ingredients together.

 

 

Add water and bring up to temperature slowly. I used a 3kW gas flame. Don’t let the sugar solution froth or boil by continuously stirring the solution.

 

 

It quickly came up to 70C (158F) without out foaming and then switch off the cooker.

 

 

Dump all the cocoa powder in one go and stir it with the spoon so that the cocoa powder is covered by the solution. This is done to prevent the cocoa powder from flying all over your kitchen when you begin to whisk it.

 

 

Upon stirring you will notice that the cocoa powder solution does look a bit watery and this is the other brand of cocoa powder.

 

 

Whisk the cocoa solution with a stick blender. This will take about five minutes.

 

 

You can see that the cocoa solution has formed a thick gel. This gel is not as thick as in the previous brand of cocoa powder.

 

 

The whisking action drops the temperature to about 40C (104F) which is cool enough to add the eggs.

 

 

I had whisked the eggs in and that was a big mistake. I should have used a spoon to mix the eggs into the chocolate mousse. You can see the large air bubble forming. This air bubbles are difficult to remove.

 

 

After whisking in the eggs you will see a layer of air bubbles on top. This brand of cocoa powder is a bit watery and hence easily forms air bubbles.

 

 

Dump in all the flour.

 

 

Use the switched off stick blender or a spoon to stir in the flour. This is to cover all the flour in the chocolate mousse and prevent it from flying all over the kitchen when you turn on the stick blender.

 

 

Whisk the flour into the chocolate mousse solution.

 

 

As you can see, after whisking in the flour the chocolate cake batter has very low viscosity, that is the chocolate cake batter is very watery. The main culprit is the brand of cocoa powder and the extra eggs I had added to strength the chocolate cake.

 

 

Pour the chocolate cake batter into a baking tin. You can observe that there are more air bubbles trapped in the chocolate cake batter while I am pouring the batter out.

 

 

As I jiggled the baking tin more air bubbles rose to the surface.

 

 

This is the baked chocolate cake. It was baked for 30 minutes at 180C (356F). It did rise more than the previous recipe but the humping of the chocolate was still there.

 

 

Here is what the sliced cake looks like. You can observe the air bubble tracks as they rose through the cake batter during baking.

 

 

This was a pretty tasty cake and was almost like a sponge cake. Most of my friends were pleased with this cake and found that it did not taste sweet and was very chocolaty.

 

 

 

Famous Chocolate and chocolate cake Recipes

This article “How to make a fast chocolate cake part 3” was researched and written by Peter Achutha.