How to make a fast chocolate cake

Tuesday 19th September 2011, Recipe 20110919

How to make a fast chocolate cake – an introduction

If you had read my previous article on how to convert Hervé This’s Chocolate Mousse into a chocolate cake you would know that it did require a little improvement. Now I would like to show you an improved chocolate cake. This chocolate cake is unbelievably quick to make.

Here is the recipe for the improved chocolate cake. You will notice that I have combined the chocolate mousse recipe with the chocolate cake recipe so that the ingredients can be weighed and mixed together instead of making two separate recipes.

 

 

Chocolate Cake Recipe

 

Chocolate Cake
Item	Ingredients	Percentage	Weight	Weight
		(%)	(g)	oz.
1	Cocoa Powder	100	50	1.76
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	65	2.29
	Sugar (Cake)	10	15	0.53
	Sugar Subtotal		80	2.816
5	Butter (Chocolate)	30	15	0.53
	Butter (Cake)	60	90	3.17
	Butter Subtotal		105	3.696
6	Eggs (Chocolate)	60	30	1.06
	Eggs (Cake)	60	90	3.17
	Eggs Subtotal		120	4.22
7	Cocoa Butter (Chocolate)	100	50	1.76
8	Water (Chocolate)	100	50	1.76
9	Salt	1	1.5	0.05
10	Vanilla	4	6	0.21
11	Milk Powder	6	9	0.32

You will notice that I am using good quality high water absorbency bread flour and self-raising flour to raise the cake. And yes, it will still taste like cake and not bread. Another reason I combined the recipes but kept the measurements for the chocolate mousse separate from the cake recipe was so that if you had any other cake recipes that you would like to convert into a chocolate cake recipe just replace the cake part of the recipe provided here with your own recipe.

 

 

Photos of chocolate cake making process

 

Weigh all the soluble and liquid ingredients together which is water, butter, cocoa butter, sugar, salt and milk powder into pot.

 

 

Prepare the cocoa and keep it aside before you heat the soluble stuff.

 

 

Heat the butters and soluble ingredients together.

 

 

Heat until the sugar solution boils over, that is start to foam and then switch off the fire.

 

 

Dump in the cocoa powder and stir to ensure there is no lose cocoa powder that will fly all over the kitchen when you whisk it.

 

 

Whisk with a stick blender until it is smooth and shiny. This will take about a minute or two or three … I forgot to time it.

 

 

This cocoa powder was whisked until the chocolate mousse is very shiny and is gel like. Let the chocolate mousse cool to room temperature. This will take about half an hour or more.

 

 

While the chocolate mousse is cooling weigh out the flour.

 

 

Once the chocolate mousse has cooled add the eggs. In Malaysia a large egg, size A or AA, is about 57g so two eggs are sufficient for this recipe.

 

 

Whisk the eggs in with the stick blender. We do this when the chocolate mousse has cooled down so that it will not coagulate and form lumps in the chocolate mousse. Furthermore, eggs contain the emulsifier lecithin. Lecithin is very good at blending water and lipids, as long as it is free, that is it is not trapped in the coagulated egg protein.

 

 

Add all the flour in one go.

 

 

And whisk the flour in with the stick blender. The chocolate mousse will thicken and let it rest for half an hour for it to thicken some more. I suspect the thickening at this stage is due to the formation of gluten from the flour, especially the bread flour. Then bake it for 10 minutes at 210C (410F). Yes this cake only requires 10 minute bake time hence it is a very fast chocolate cake.

 

 

The baked cake. It came out of the baking tin pretty easily.

 

 

Not bad… the cake was quite good to eat. It did need a little improvement as it did break easily (see the crack running across the chocolate cake in the photo above). Some people thought that the crumbling was due to dryness but this is not the case. It melted in the mouth. I suspect the crumbliness was due to the lack of sufficient proteins to bind the cake into one piece.

 

I am trying one or two more experiments to improve the crumbliness and the final recipe should be out in the next few days.

 

 

 

Famous Chocolate and chocolate cake Recipes

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