I’m with @fre - that third cake is baked mousse au chocolat!
My grandmother’s chocolate cake is the best chocolate cake, because it works plain as a snack cake, with whipped cream and berries, or frosted and filled for birthdays. Shortly before she died, she finally shared her secret recipe. It’s on the back of the Hershey’s cocoa can. It has a weird technique in it; after making a fairly straightforward cake batter, you add a cup of boiling water. Somehow, the resultant watery batter bakes up surprisingly dense, rich, and ■■■■■. (It’s a valid word for cake descriptions, right?)
Yes!
So when he forgets to cut the butter with the sugar, which creates the air bubbles that literaly causes the cake to raise, then just dumps some flour sugar chocolate in there instead, I figured the rest of the thing was faked.
Then later he talks about how he prefers dutch process to regular cocoa but does not seem to know or care that the pH is totally different and that effects leavening as well.
Finally, he thinks boxed cake mix is an ingredient…
nope.
The best chocolate cake is Wacky Cake, and I will not accept any evidence to the contrary. It has nine ingredients, including water, which, if you have to add it, is an ingredient. It is also a cake, not just baked mousse(?!?) with ganache on top.
To be fair the Ghirardelli boxed brownie mix absolutely contains crack. I could eat a whole pan at a time.
Now box cake mix? I’ve had some that are passable and okay, but from scratch is miles better.
Anyone that considers instant pudding mix an ingredient gets a hard pass from me (unless you are just making pudding).
Because that’s not a cake? You could argue that it is silly to bake cookie batter if you’re one of those people who like to eat it raw, but a lot of people think cooking things improves texture and taste (and is safer too for anything that contains eggs).
That’s the point - it’s not a cake, it’s mousse! Baking it for 45 minutes doesn’t make it a cake, it just turns it into a block of chocolate. I know because I have made this cake.
I love chocolate, and since I also love to bake I make a lot of chocolate cakes. My daughter & I trade 2 or 3 ingredient recipes, because some of them are genius and delicious, like 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies, but some are a complete waste of good ingredients, like this cake.
This ranks just above dusty cello-wrapped snack cakes from the corner store on a “would I eat this again” scale.
What if I whipped a whole bottle of chocolate syrup then freeze dried it. Or perhaps drop it in liquid nitrogen and stir a lot, like those instant icecream recipes.
The batter does seem way too thin, but as you say it bakes up just fine.
