The Secret Ingredient for the Richest, Most Delicious Chocolate Cake
Slice of chocolate cake
Few things in life can brighten up a day as effectively as a chocolate cake. Whether you prefer a layer cake with a silky smooth chocolate ganache and piped frosting or a simple sheet cake, it's hard to go wrong with this classic treat. Chocolate cake makes a perfect Valentine's Day treat, but it's also welcome pretty much any time of year.
But what if we told you that there was an easy way to seriously upgrade your chocolate cake with just one simple ingredient that you almost certainly already have in the house? Food pros, including Ina herself, sign off on this trick—and it just might change your dessert life for good. Here's what you need to know about adding coffee to chocolate cake.
Related: 12 Decadent Chocolate Cakes You Have to Make
What Does Coffee Do to Chocolate Cake?
At some point, we noticed that some of our favorite chocolate cakes, like the Devil's Food Cake by pastry chef and Serious Eats Editor Emeritus Stella Parks, and Beatty's Chocolate Cake, which is the legendary Ina Garten chocolate cake had something in common: some hot coffee added to the batter.
After digging a little deeper (and trying plenty of chocolate cakes made with and without coffee), we found out that adding coffee to chocolate cake can help activate the baking soda, which helps your cake rise nice and tall and the brew also helps bring out and deepen the flavor of the chocolate. Even though many recipes call for adding a full cup of strong black coffee to the recipe, the finished cake doesn't taste like coffee. It just tastes like the best version of itself—light, rich and so chocolatey.
How Do You Add Coffee to Chocolate Cake?
You can find a chocolate cake recipe (like the two above) that calls for adding coffee to the batter or you can sub out up to half of the water called for in other recipes for coffee. This even works with boxed chocolate cake mix, making it a fun and easy way to fancy up a shortcut ingredient. If you don't have brewed coffee handy, you can make some quickly using instant espresso.
Instant espresso is also a fun thing to whisk into chocolate sauces to deepen the flavor without adding liquid. Once you give this trick a shot (pun very much intended!) we suspect you'll never make your chocolate cake any other way again.
