Devil's Food White-Out Cake

As mentioned in a previous post, I went to Houston's central public library late last month. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to simply borrow books. On this book borrowing trip, I checked out Baking, From my Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. I have been reading Ms. Greenspan's blog for months now and I have been dying to get my hands on one of her books. You can find her blog at http://www.doriegreenspan.com/. She is quite well known in the baking world. Several years ago she teamed up with Julia Childs to write Baking with Julia. Anyways, the cover recipe to this book is this Devil's Food White-Out Cake. Out of respect to Ms. Greenspan, I will not post the recipe on my blog but you can find it at website I will mention later. I will simply put pictures of my attempt and discuss the recipe some. If you are interested in making this cake, you can find it on page 247 of Baking, From my Home to Yours or visit the following website at NPR.

Because I am not going to include the recipe, I plan on discussing some things I have been thinking about in regards to the science behind baking. As you guys have probably already gathered, I am interested in learning how to make cakes taste better and their presentation. I am going to research the effect of too much chocolate on a cake for this entry...because this is what I did the first time I made the cake. I know I am always mentioning my errors on this blog!  Haha!  You live, you learn and the second, third and fourth times are sometimes the charm.

Okay, cake talk first.


I had the help of some friends from college in making the icing. The icing in this recipe is different from any icing that I have ever made. It is almost marshmallowy and required whipping eggs, a candy thermometer monitoring a sugar water syrup over the stove and more whipping when the two mixtures were mixed together. I wish I had a Kitchen Aid mixer to do the whipping in this recipe instead of enlisting my friends biceps. It took a long time.  When we were done or what I thought was done I tried to ice the cake.  The icing wasn't marshmellowy enough...I think we needed to whip it more after added the caramelized sugar to the soft peak egg whites.  Maybe even 5 minutes more of whipping or some KitchenAid magic.  Nonetheless, the icing wasn't near fluffy enough and as you can see, my cake didn't look too much like Ms. Greenspan's.

The cake itself I made two times. (which I mentioned above) The recipe called for two types of chocolate (a melted bittersweet chocolate and semisweet mini chocolate chips). The first time I made the recipe, when it said to add the melted chocolate...I thought all of the chocolate was suppose to be melted down and added. Here I was wrong... which resulted a REALLY dry cake.  The second cake was incredibly melt in your mouth moist.  The antithesis...interesting.  The second cake overall rates at a 3.7 out of 5.  I have eaten better chocolate cakes but this one was darn good.  My biggest complaint was the icing was too sweet, but this may just as well be my fault in the end. 

After making this cake though, I was left with many questions.  One of the most prevent being why did the excess chocolate dry out the cake?

So I scavenged the internet to learn more about chocolate itself first. It only seems right to learn more about the ingredient near Valentine's day too right? My hopes were ultimately to see if the excess chocolate was really the reason why the cake was so dry. My findings were as follows:

Chocolate comes from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. See picture below:

According to Wikipedia (the source of all good knowledge :) ), people have been cultivating the cacao tree since 1100 BC in Central and South America. Now, I know what your thinking. When can I start growing my own cacao tree in my backyard? Unfortunately, cacao beans directly off the tree do not equate to chocolate. The cacao beans have a really bitter taste directly off the tree and first need to be fermented. (I think of beer immediately here). To do this, the cacao pods are harvested by hand from the cacao trees. In Central America, cacao trees produce buds year round. So this can be done on a continuous basis. The cacao fruits are opened and the pulp and beans are transferred to larger containers. The following website has a good picture of the start of the fermentation process: Cacao Beans Fermeting. Fermentation occurs when the pulp surrounding the bean is converted into alcohol by the yeasts present in the air and the heat generated by the box the beans are in. After fermentation, which takes 2-7 days, is completed, the beans are sun-dried. This takes 1-2 weeks. On larger plantation, the beans can be dried by an electric dryer. Once dry, the beans are ready for domestic consumption and are often shipped to cocoa and chocolate manufacturers. As of now the question mentioned above is unanswered, but the chocolate discussion will be continued on the next post.  Maybe I will find my answer between now and then. This topic will be continued in the next post.