2. Most demanding: Claire Saffitz’s chocolate cake
Overall rating: 7/10
Get the recipe: Chocolate cake by Claire Saffitz
This recipe is a bit of a project, involving a lot of steps and a lot of dishes. You will make three cake layers in 8-inch pans. To make the dough, first combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer; then mix the cocoa powder and hot cocoa in a bowl, then beat the crème fraiche and vanilla; beat whole eggs and yolks in a separate bowl; finally, you will mix the oil and half of the crème fraiche mixture into the dry ingredients, then mix in the eggs and the remaining crème fraiche mixture.
You will bake the crusts for the cake and then proceed to the icing, which involves heating the milk and sugar in a saucepan, whisking the egg-sugar-cocoa mixture in a bowl, tempering the egg mixture with warm milk, heating the cream until thick. , and pour it over the chocolate to melt.
Next, you will whip up the pudding, adding a little at a time of butter to finish the frosting. The cake layers are slightly raised, so you need to even them out by cutting some off with a long serrated knife before assembling the cake.
The finished dessert is tall, tasty and very moist. The flavor is super intense and bitter — especially in the frosting (which doesn’t use powdered sugar), but for me the cake was too rich to enjoy more than a few bites at a time (let alone an entire 3-layer slice ). And compared to the other recipes in this roundup, the extra effort involved just wasn’t worth it.