4 Levels of Chocolate Cake: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

Hi guys, my name is Keith and I'm a level one chef. Hi, I'm Daniel and I'm a level two chef. Hi, I'm Penny and I'm a chef at the Institute of Culinary Education and I've been a chef for 15 years. Today we are making Keith's One Bowl Lava Cake Extravaganza. So this recipe came from online and like multiple different recipes and I kinda like adapted it and made it into one and it all just came together. My chocolate cake is a two layer chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and a chocolate ganache drizzle. It's a whole mouthful. The perfect combination of flavors for me is chocolate and peanut butter. And then I add a little bit of strawberry and strawberry jam to make it more like a peanut butter and jelly cake. Okay, so first we're gonna make the cake batter. So I've got some all purpose flour, I've got cocoa powder, I've got baking powder, baking soda, and salt. And the sugar. And espresso powder. The espresso powder does not make it taste like coffee. It actually is gonna bring out the richness of the chocolate a lot. You know, I feel like I just tried to go flourless just cause it's kinda like on trend. Everybody's like paleo and this and that and like no gluten. So I was like, oh, let's see what this tastes like and it kinda tastes the same, so. And I'm just gonna whisk them all together. So the whole point of the sifter basically is just to eliminate massive chunks of powder kinda getting stuck and clumped together in the batter. Dry ingredients are all set in one bowl. So I put the double boiler onto warm and I have semi-sweet chocolate chips and 12 tablespoons of butter. So just gonna throw it all in there. We're gonna take your butter, like get on in there. See, I'm sure there's like a right technique for this but I kinda just go like an ax a little bit, kinda just like chop on in there. Now I'm gonna mix together all of my liquid ingredients. First things first, we've got sugar, we've got vegetable oil. I'm gonna use a couple eggs here. And then I'm gonna whisk them together just to make it easy for all the other liquid ingredients to combine. Vanilla extract, good stuff. Adds some flavor, adds a little color. And we're going to mix this up until it's all sort of uniform. You just wanna get like all the lumps up in there. You don't want any more chips. You just kinda need it to be like luxurious, silky consistency. All right, now we're gonna add some sour cream. It adds a lot of moisture. Don't knock it till you try it. Then I have my brown butter. But the good thing with this is like you can't really mess that. Like I mean, it's chocolate, you know? So like even if it's burnt, it's chocolate. Like it won't taste that bad, you know? I'm gonna alternate between adding my dry ingredients and the liquid ingredient for my cake, which is actually brewed coffee. It actually adds to the color, makes it a lot darker, and gives it a rich chocolatey flavor, which is awesome. And then I have some milk for richness. And some water. Shockingly, with chocolate cake, the more fat that you add to it, the more you dull that chocolate flavor. All right, so we're almost done. I'm gonna pour it into the bigger bowl. So we're gonna put our vanilla extract. And we're gonna put our sugar. All right, so we're just gonna mix this in. First with a spoon. And we're almost done. Like, you see how fast I was? All right, so now we're gonna get our four eggs. Crack them in there. Now we get our yogurt, because you wanna stay moisturized, y'all. I'm just gonna throw our cornstarch in there. Y'all see? One bowl, one bowl. We don't need nothing fancy. And now we're just gonna mix it all in together. So now you wanna do this for about three minutes. You just wanna get it all mixed in there. Now I'm just gonna drizzle in these ingredients until I make pretty much a paste. And then the last thing I like to do is just give it a little bit of a mix by hand. Your batter at this point, completely finished. All right, so now we got our batter. We're gonna put them into our ramekins. We have six six-ounce ramekins, which we need to grease first. So, like, this is pretty janky. But I just take a melted stick of butter and I kind of just go like, bluh-luh-luh-luh, you know? Like, that sounds like in your mind. Like I said, the cake is two layers. So we're gonna take two nine-inch pans. This has gotta be a better way. I just don't know it, you know? But this is actually ridiculous. Gonna line the bottoms of them with some baking sheets and parchment paper. That's the secret to always making sure that your cakes come out of the pan. That's what makes it so special. You'll never see another recipe doing it like this. That's for sure. That's the extravaganza. And now it's time for pouring. Okay, so I'm gonna pan this out. So you kind of wanna fill it up three-fourths of the way because it kind of rises when you bake it. I'm just gonna eyeball this into the two nine-inch pans and hope it all goes okay. So now these are gonna go in the oven and they're gonna bake until they spring back in the center at about 350 degrees. It's gonna be somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes. About 30 to 32 minutes. And it's supposed to be like 12 minutes, but you kind of just gotta keep checking because the middle is supposed to be still moist and jiggly wiggly. So the cakes are in the oven. Now is the perfect time to work on all the accessories. So most cakes have frosting on the inside, but since this is lava, we don't need no frosting. No, so with the powdered sugar, I just kind of do a little sprinkle on top. It looks like a little snowfall. And then I put the ice cream on the side of it and then you cut on into it and it's a perfect pair. Now we're gonna make our frosting. Kiss bye-bye to your diet because you're gonna need six sticks of butter. So we got butter, we got cocoa powder, all the powdered sugar you can find, some vanilla and heavy cream. We're gonna throw it into the mixer. This is six ounces of egg whites and I'm gonna add 12 ounces of white sugar to that. And I'm gonna whisk this together and now I'm gonna put it over simmering water. Now get to just start letting this butter mix, get creamy. I'm gonna whip it completely until it's cool. And once it's completely cooled, I'm gonna add my softened butter. Throw all the cocoa powder in there and some vanilla. Now is sort of the last step. We're gonna go back and forth between adding a couple scoops of powdered sugar and a little bit of heavy cream. My temperature right now is just right enough to be able to add the butter and I'm gonna whisk it until it comes together. I'm gonna add some salt and then the main star of this buttercream is peanut butter. That is all done. So the jelly part of my peanut butter and jelly chocolate cake consists of two different things. Macerated strawberries and then a fresh made strawberry jam. So I'm gonna take a few and put them on a cutting board. My sugar, my lemon. I'm gonna use the zest. I'll add a little of my juice now. I have a measured amount of sugar here. This is good and ready to go. This is a chocolate overload cake and it requires a chocolate ganache. So we've got some dark chocolate and some heavy cream. Cut the chocolate into smaller, more manageable pieces. The heavy cream, just looking for it to simmer a little bit. Starts to bubble up and get nice and warm. So I'm just gonna drizzle it all over the chocolate and all the heat from the heavy cream is gonna do the work here and just melt this down. So we're gonna make a jam out of these fresh strawberries. All my berries go in. Some more lemon zest and my sugar, a vanilla bean and then you just cook it down until it looks like it's starting to become the right consistency. And that is chocolate ganache. So these are my homemade honey roasted peanuts. We're gonna make a caramel for a garnish. For my dry caramel, I'm gonna start the pan pretty high. I'm just gonna start by adding a little bit of sugar to the bottom of the pot. Off the heat and get the peanuts in as quickly as possible and then I'll pour this out. That's my caramel. This is gonna sit at room temperature and firm up. It's gonna take about 10 or 15 minutes and we'll be able to break it into shards later for our garnish. Now we wanna melt chocolate over a double boiler. Chocolate's almost melted. I'm gonna take it off the heat and continue mixing it. And now while it's still warm, I'm gonna add some micro, some cocoa butter powder, some peanut butter, some more salt and a good amount of those honey roasted peanuts. And then I'm gonna roll this out. I'm gonna throw it into the freezer to set for about 15 minutes before we assemble our cake. All right, we're back fresh from the oven and I got my little ramekin and I wanna get it out onto the plate. So kind of cut around it quickly because tons of the essence. You need to get it out before it sets. I'm gonna put the plate on top, hopefully, so I can just slip it out. Come on, Jesus. It's not cooked. This is clearly not a cake. So I have five other ones back in the oven. I don't know what to do with this. All right, here we go, take two. Let's hope this is not pudding again, but you never know. Grab the plate. Jesus, take the wheel. All right, so this is my beautiful lopsided cake. Look how lava-y it looks. Am I right? We sprayed the absolute hell out of these pans, so I'm hoping that the cake comes out nicely. Can't tell, though, I'm very scared. Oh, oh. Yes, oh, nice. Now it's time to assemble the cake. So now I'm just gonna sprinkle some sugar on top. Hide the imperfections with confection. All right, so now I'm gonna get my ice cream. Just give it a good old scoop. Maybe I'll do another one. Why not? I think we're so fun. Nice and close to the edge. Just kinda work your way around in a circle and fill in any loose little spots. Kind of smooth this over. Layer one. Done. So I'll start by lining this cake with strawberry syrup. Then I'm gonna start to take my strawberries, and then I'll start to place them flat so I have a nice, even layer. I wanna pipe a dam around the cake. That's gonna trap in my looser jam filling, and not allow it to come out the sides. And then over the top of my fresh strawberries, on my strawberry jam layer. Then my second layer of cake goes on, and one more layer of my strawberry syrup. So now I've taken my crunchy layer out of the freezer, and I'm gonna use an eight-inch cardboard to trim this up. Take my crunch layer, place it on top. Line it up as best you can. Right on top, just like that. Next layer is my peanut butter buttercream. My final layer of cake, my final layer of strawberry syrup. I'm gonna do my crumb coat now. So I start by adding a pretty decent-sized dollop of buttercream to the top of my cake, and then it will set in the freezer for a few minutes before we do our final coat. We're gonna coat the entire top of this, and then we're gonna work our way around the sides. Just get it nice and flat. That way everything is covered in this chocolatey buttercream frosting. Now we're gonna go over the edges and just make them nice and smooth. Your cake is frosting. We're not gonna stop there. It's a chocolate overload. We have the ganache to do. This is gonna go around the outside of the cake, sort of like a border, and then also coat the top. And just real lightly on the outside of the cake. If it drips down, it's okay. And then with the remaining ganache, I'm gonna take that and sort of do a little crisscross drizzle up top, because this is going to be a final third layer of frosting. So you have this nice kind of drizzly, dripping chocolate effect. Okay, so while my cake is chilling, I'll just take a second and smash up my caramel for my garnish. And these are my caramel shards to garnish my cake. And I'm gonna add my final coating of buttercream and smooth it out. Ah, now you're done. I'm just kidding, you're not done. We're gonna do some chocolate buttercream rosettes to finish off the cake, make it look nice and pretty. Now I'm going to put some of my crumb on it. And then to finish this baby off, I'm gonna put some more of my buttercream into a piping bag and find my shards. And the last little touch is a little bit of edible gold, because gold makes everything a little bit better. Now presenting Keith's One Bowl Chocolate Lava Cake Extravaganza. This is my overindulgent chocolate sugar bomb cake. And this is my peanut butter and jelly chocolate cake. All right, time to dig on in. Yes, this is delicious. It's life-changing, it's magnificent, it's very rich, expensive, divine, Michelin. The chocolate is super strong, the crunchy layer with the nuts in it, it adds a lot of texture, which it really needs because the cake is super smooth. I can already feel the heart stop and artery clogging power that this cake has inside it. This is so good. I would definitely cook it for longer. This is like the fourth time I made it, so if I just keep going, I'll know exactly when to leave it in the oven for. This is the best thing I've ever done. This cake is perfect, I wouldn't do a thing differently. Our three chefs made three very different versions of chocolate cake. Let's look at how each put their personal stamp on this classic dessert. Daniel and Penny each made a layered cake, while Keith made a flourless lava cake. A flourless lava cake is a rich and dense cake that remains gooey in the middle after baking because unlike traditional layer cakes, there's no chemical leavener to make it light and airy. Keith's semi-sweet chocolate chips are dark, at minimum 35% cocoa. This makes them less sweet than milk chocolate, which is why Keith added sugar to his batter. Butter adds a smooth quality because it's so high in fat, it blends very well with the semi-sweet chocolate. Keith also incorporated yogurt, which adds a tang and lowers the pH of this cake, stabilizing the natural anthocyanin pigments in chocolate, giving a deep brown color to this cake. In place of flour, Keith added cornstarch, which gelatinizes upon heating, giving this cake some stability. He also mixed his batter by hand because his cake is dense, so no additional air was needed. Daniel made a classic layer cake using all of the ingredients you might expect to find in a chocolate cake, sugar for sweetness, flour for gluten development and cake structure, and a combination of baking soda and baking powder to give extra lift and porosity for this high-volume batter. He used oil in place of butter in his batter, which is not going to incorporate as much air when mixing, but it will give a rich quality to a dense chocolate cake. Oil is almost 100% fat, while butter is 80% fat and 20% water. So when using oil in your cake, there's less water available for gluten development, giving you a tender cake, and less water for evaporation, giving you a moist cake. The addition of coffee helps to combine the dry ingredients and, along with the espresso powder, adds a nice complementary chocolate flavor to this cake. Penny's cake included some of the same ingredients as Daniel's, but she used brown butter instead of oil. By heating the butter, water is removed, and browning occurs, making this ingredient chemically similar to Daniel's oil, but with a distinctive nutty, roasted, and caramely flavor that Daniel's oil won't supply. All three chefs used different-sized pans. Keith baked his chocolate lava cakes in individual small ramekins for the shortest time at the highest temperature because he was looking for a gooey center. Heat from the oven makes contact with the ramekin first through conduction, then heats up the batter, touching the ramekin, and then diffuses through the batter. Timing is important for lava cakes because if you add too much heat over time, you'll bake the entire cake and lose that gooey center. Daniel baked his chocolate cake in two nine-inch pans. Daniel rotated his cakes while baking to ensure even baking, but be careful when doing this. If the batter's not set, you may deflate the cake by moving them. Penny divided her batter into three parchment-lined eight-inch pans. The pan's smaller diameter didn't require rotation for even heating. Keith dusted his cake with powdered sugar, which is simple, sweet, and contrasts the dark chocolate nicely. High the imperfections with confection. Because lava cake is best served warm, a quick and easy frosting is ideal. Daniel made an American buttercream by combining lots of soft butter with cocoa powder and adding confectioner's sugar with heavy cream to dissolve the sugar and bring it all together. He also made a chocolate ganache to drizzle over the cake. Ganache is made by drizzling hot cream over solid chocolate, creating an emulsion made from the water from the cream and sugar from the chocolate. Ganache drizzled there, look at that. Penny made a more complex Swiss buttercream. I'm kind of a rebel. Next, she made her own honey roasted peanuts, which are sweet and crunchy, but also added toasty caramel notes. She used some of these peanuts to make a dry caramel, similar to a brittle as a garnish, by cooking sugar to reduce water and increase browning, giving it a complex caramel flavor. Her macerated strawberries were made by simply adding sugar to freshly sliced strawberries with no cooking involved. This is different from the strawberry jam, which was cooked and had a much higher sugar to strawberry ratio. Penny's chocolate peanut butter crunch combined the honey roasted peanuts with melted chocolate, salt, and mycryo, which is pure cocoa butter in a powdered form. She shaped this mixture into the size of her eight-inch diameter pan and froze it, making cake assembly much easier. Keith's assembly was simple. He turned his lava cakes onto a plate, dusted with powdered sugar, and served it with ice cream, which provides a pleasing contrast to the hot cake and complements that gooey chocolate lava. Baking it at 375 degrees for only 12 minutes didn't allow the cake to cook thoroughly, rendering it impossible to properly flip out of his ramekin and onto the plate without a splat. But it wasn't a cake, and it certainly wasn't visually appealing. Keith's pudding extravaganza. Keith then cooked his cakes a little bit longer and came away with a perfectly cooked cake that flipped onto the plate well. Good thing he always makes more than one individual serving. Daniel secured his cake by placing a dollop of frosting directly onto the plate. He then added his first cake layer, piped his frosting, and smoothed it with an offset spatula, which made it much easier to spread. Daniel then added the ganache, which dripped over the sides of the cake as an additional burst of chocolate. I feel like I'm lovingly caressing the ganache into this cake. He piped rosettes for decoration, giving his cake a final additional visual flourish. Penny has a complicated assembly because she's considering appearance, texture, and flavor. She began by applying strawberry syrup to her first layer, allowing the chocolate cake to absorb the fruity flavor directly. She then added the second layer of cake, more syrup, and then a layer of frozen peanut crunch and additional buttercream. Finally, she adds the last cake layer and coats the entire cake with buttercream and decorates it with a brittle and some gold leaf. This gold makes everything a little bit better. With its many carefully balanced components and extravagant design, Penny's cake is unmistakably made by a level three chef. Next time you're making chocolate cake, I hope you'll consider some of these sweet tips so you can have your cake and eat it too.