Sinfully Rich Chocolate Devil's Food Cake {or Cupcakes}

What I love about this recipe

• It's so rich and fudgy that it blurs the line between chocolate cake and brownies.
• It produces layers of cake that bake up perfectly flat and stackable.
• The velvety crumb practically melts in your mouth, and yet...
• It's sturdy enough to stack up to every imaginable filling and frosting.

In other words, this chocolate cake is wicked good and earned the right to be called Devil's Food.

5 Tips for baking a really good chocolate cake

#1. Use Dutch process cocoa powder

This is an important difference. Chocolate is naturally acidic, and acidic reactions are a super important thing to understand in baking.

Acid enhances flavors, influences how a cake rises, and affects the cake's consistency. For the most part, you want some acid in your cake. Just not too much.

In chocolate cakes that call for acidic ingredients  (like the unsweetened chocolate, baking powder, espresso, brown sugar, and sour cream in this recipe) Dutch processed works best because, unlike natural cocoa powder, it's gone through a process to neutralize its acidity.

In this recipe, using Dutch-processed cocoa powder means we can add enough to get a super rich chocolate flavor without overdoing the amount of acid in the batter.

If your local supermarket is anything like mine, the selection of cocoa powder is super limited. Mine usually carries one brand of Dutch process cocoa powder - Hershey's Special Dark. This brand works perfectly well. You can also find other options online. Besides Hershey's Dark, the brand I use is The Cocoa Trader.

#2. Use room temperature ingredients

In this Devil's Food Cake recipe, as in most cake recipes, you'll notice the words "at room temperature" after the butter, eggs, and sour cream. This is important. Please don't ignore it. At room temperature, eggs and dairy form an emulsion that traps air.

This is a good thing because all that trapped air expands in the oven, producing a fluffy consistency. Without this process, your cake won't rise well and you might end up with something more like a hockey puck than a cake.

Also, room temperature ingredients blend together better. For example, have you ever tried to beat cold butter with sugar? It doesn't really work.

The sugar won't fully incorporate into the butter until the butter is at room temperature. Using room temperature ingredients creates a smooth, fully blended batter that will result in a uniform texture and even baking.

If you manage to plan ahead a bit, simply set the butter, eggs, and sour cream out on the counter a couple of hours before you plan to make your cake. I rarely succeed in this level of pre-planning and so have come up with a few tricks for brining eggs and dairy to room temperature quickly. 

#3. Use butter for flavor and oil for lightness and moisture

Oil is wonderful in cakes. When compared to butter, cakes baked with oil are loftier, have a more even crumb and stay moist and fresh tasting much longer. Case in point - Olive Oil Cake is moist, flavorful, tender and delicious, and keeps that fresh-from-the-oven texture for days after baking.

The same is true for my favorite Spice Cake and Carrot Cake recipes, both of which are oil based cakes and decadently moist and flavorful.

Oil is particularly great in chocolate cakes because chocolate tends to dry out a cake. And this cake has a LOT of chocolate.

So, why doesn't this recipe use ALL oil instead of a combination of butter and oil? Flavor. Butter adds flavor.

For this recipe, I found that 5 tablespoons of butter and 5 tablespoons of oil was the perfect balance for maximum buttery flavor AND a moist, tender crumb.

#4. Add some extra egg yolks

Eggs create essential structure and stability in cakes. Egg whites are fantastic at trapping air, which helps cakes rise in the oven, giving them a light texture. Yolks are fantastic at binding liquids and fats together, creating an emulsion that results in a super smooth homogenous batter.

Yolks also have a high fat content, contributing to this cake's rich flavor and velvety texture.

In this Devil's Food Cake Recipe, the combination of a total of 6 egg yolks and 2 egg whites achieves the perfect balance of a rich, fudgy consistency that isn't overly dense.

# 5. How to bake flat cake layers that are easy to stack

Sure, you can level off the top of a cake that's dome shaped. But, wouldn't you rather not have to?

If you follow the instructions to use room temperature ingredients in this recipe so that you have a homogenous, smooth batter, you're well on your way to baking well-risen flat cake layers. Baking the layers at 325 degrees will get you the rest of the way there.

Baking at a lower temperature slows down the cake's "spring" - how quickly it rises in the oven. This prevents a dome from forming on the top of the cake layers. If only every problem in life had such a simple solution.

Important note about baking temperature: Most of us are baking with ovens that are not 100% accurate when it comes to temperature. It's totally worth it to invest in an oven thermometer that will tell you what temperature your oven actually is.

Cakes that begin with this recipe

• Black Forest Cake. Every bite of this Black Forest Cake is loaded with creamy chocolate and juicy cherries. Three deep, dark, rich and chocolaty Devil's Food cakes are doused with cherry liquor, layered with sweetened vanilla whipped cream and tart Morello cherries, and topped with dark chocolate ganache.
• German Chocolate Cake. This German Chocolate Cake is all about rich chocolate fudge cake, warm caramel filling with toasted pecans and sweet coconut, and milk chocolate ganache.
• German Chocolate Cupcakes. Dark Chocolate Devil's Food Cupcakes topped with a generous spoonful of rich, caramel German Chocolate topping packed with toasted pecans and coconut, and covered in a drizzle of chocolate ganache.
• Blackout Chocolate Cake. If there's a way to pack more chocolate into this cake, I don't know what it is. Three layers of rich Devil's Food Cake are layered with Chocolate Pastry Cream and then covered in a thick layer of chocolate ganache. It's a chocolate lover's wet dream. Yes. I just said that.
• Double Chocolate Cupcakes with Amaretto Pastry Cream and Almond Pralines. These chocolate cupcakes are filled with Amaretto Pastry Cream, frosted with whipped chocolate ganache and topped with almond pralines. Because if you're going to eat a cupcake, it should be an amazing cupcake.

Devil's Food Cake is a Building Block Recipe

Building block recipes are tried-and-true recipes that I consider foundational to great home baking. They are the kind of recipes I come back to over and over again, sometimes baking them as is, but often using them as a jumping off point to create something new. > Scroll through all Building Block recipes.

If you give this recipe a try, let me know! Leave a comment, rate it, or take a picture and tag it #ofbatteranddough on Instagram.

Happy baking!