How to make the Perfect Chocolate cake - Rich, dense moist cake recipe with Ganache Buttercream

I have a special gift for you today. I am sharing my

chocolate

cake

recipe

. This is a

recipe

never shared before and I am so excited to bring it to you today. This is the

chocolate

cake

I use in all my cake carvings. It's lovely.

dense

but very

moist

very

rich

and delicious I'm also going to share this

ganache

buttercream

recipe with you, so let's get started now. There are many different ways to incorporate chocolate into a chocolate recipe and you can use chocolate powder, you can melt regular chocolate. You can just use chocolate chunks, so for this cake you want a

rich

chocolate flavor, so for that I'm using baking chocolate, unsweetened baking chocolate, the brand I like is Bakers, but of course use any brand you like. you like it The first thing we are going to do is melt it.

Many people just put the chocolate in the microwave and that's fine. In fact, my microwave has a milk chocolate button that I use all the time and I love it, but I find that when you heat the chocolate in the microwave, it actually cools down much faster and doesn't stay as liquid for long, so I prefer to use the double boiler method. Now this isn't an official double boiler, it's a saucepan with boiling water and then a bowl on top like that. Get all the heat from the steam and it will melt the chocolate beautifully, but it won't burn it.

Now it's going to take a little bit of time to melt it and then it's going to take a little bit of time too to cool down a little bit, so I always start. my cake starting this right away and then I put my other ingredients together and start with the next component of this recipe is boiling water so adding boiling water to cake recipes is actually one of the things that helps them keep a ton of

moist

ure, so this is great for this cake. Now I add a little cocoa to mine to add that extreme chocolate flavor I'm looking for.

I'm just going to add my regular cocoa and then a little bit of this dark cocoa and blend it in, you can always. Substitute some or all of the cocoa for coffee or espresso powder if you like, a lot of people love that flavor with the balance of chocolate, I personally don't do that now. I'm going to add a little oil now while I can. I use vegetable oil or I prefer to use olive oil. I feel like vegetable oil tastes rancid in baked goods most of the time, so I avoid it and use a really good olive oil, but again, the best part is cooking and baking so you can customize all of this, so use what you have on hand and then we'll add the sour cream.

Technically, this is a sour cream chocolate cake, but I'll let you in on a little secret if I don't have sour cream. I will only use natural yogurt. In fact, I use plain yogurt and sour cream completely interchangeably when it comes to baking and even in most cooking, so if you don't have sour cream, use plain yogurt. I would say half the time I do. this cake is with yogurt and it turns out just as amazing now we are going to mix the sour cream oil and the chocolate water, okay, let's check again with our sugar-free chocolate, oh look, it's soft, it's melted, now we're going to remove it . heat it up and let it cool a little bit now we're going to mix the dry ingredients first we have the flour and we have the sugar baking soda and salt and then we just give it a little mix now we're going to add this chocolate water oil sour cream mixture to the ingredients dry and we're going to mix that in and if you don't have side scrapers as part of your mixer,

make

sure you use a spatula and scrape down the sides or anywhere low where maybe the powder is stuck.

Alright, now let's add the eggs. The first thing we're going to do is add four eggs here and beat them, and the reason is because all the ingredients go in the same place and I don't want to. to mess up something new, but if you want to pick up a completely different bowl and put the eggs in a little bit, feel free, you don't have to overbeat them like you just said, we don't want to overbeat the eggs, we just kind of want to split them up and then mix them again now we're ready to add oh, it smells so good, I know it doesn't taste good because there's no sugar or anything in this, but oh, it's so pretty, it smells so good.

Alright, now we're going to take our melted chocolate that's slightly cooled and add it to our mixture, bring it down and then slowly pour it in in a nice steady stream, oh look at that. It looks amazing now I like the color looking cake so this recipe is actually going to

make

three eight inch layers so I'm going to prepare my pans now so I have three eight inch cakes. The first thing I'll do is I like to use uh. It's a baker's delight but any nonstick spray or whatever you want to use I always hold my pan this way and spray one on it that catches the overspray that way and if you hold it this way you try to spray these you don't really they do it.

Spray as well when they are at an angle as when they are upright. What I do, I do it over the sink that way, it's not as messy, then I take my cake circle and put it in. Another tip is to use baking in uniform strips. What that does is you make it wet, you soak it. I do this from the beginning, before you do anything else, you soak it in cold water and then you wrap it around the base of your pan like that and what that helps do is keep the outside of the pan a little bit cooler so that the cake can cook more evenly, so that the outside cooks very quickly and leaves the center like rock.

One last tip you can do is take a flower clove. and put it in the middle of the parchment circle before you put it in the pan and that will help warm up the center of your cake and then pour this delicious batter directly into the pan, spread it evenly between the three pans and now it's time to put. in the oven to bake it okay let's talk about frosting if you've seen any of my other cake videos you know my go to is

ganache

it's delicious it's made the same way as a truffle so you're basically putting frosting on your cake with that rich truffle ash and it's so good the reason I prefer it under fondant is you can get those nice crispy edges or if you're carving a cake you can get your details uh really really really detailed , that way of saying it.

That's why I prefer ganache for that, um, but you know, a layer cake like the one we're going to make today, not everyone likes ganache, no matter how rich it is, no matter how delicious it is, because it hardens and makes it firm, it's not always the best option for a nice piece of sticky cake, so another option, of course, is

buttercream

. Buttercream has a lot of different options for me. American buttercream is simply too sweet, and then like Swiss meringue or Italian buttercreams, they can be a bit complicated. to make and for me they are super buttery, which sometimes there is a place for that, sometimes I really like it, but I just want a rich,

dense

chocolate cake with a rich, rich frosting, so I'm going to marry them both .

We're going to make a buttercream ganache so we still have more smoothness from our buttercream but it's going to have the richness of the ganache, so the first thing we're going to do is make a batch of ganache, so I've got my Skillet here and from done I already turned the heat on, so this is going to simmer when we pour it in, but first we're going to take our cream and heat it up while the cream heats up. Do you want to weigh? get out your chocolate now I like to mix my chocolates I like to use a couple different types uh but of course if you have a favorite chocolate you can go ahead and use it if you only use one brand of chocolate your frosting will taste

perfect

I like that chocolate so that if you love Dove and you use it, it will taste like Hershey's, you know, etcetera, so I like to mix mine up, for that reason one of the chocolates that I really like are Trader Joe's chocolate bars, yes, you have to cut them. which is a bit annoying compared to buying them already in wafer form, which melts beautifully, but it is a very high quality chocolate at a really great price.

Now you don't want the cream to overheat. You can see this is just starting to smoke a little. bit and we're starting to get some nice little bubbles around the outside edge, so this is done. What you don't want to do is wait until it's already boiling, that's too hot and will end up curdling your garage that you just want. this will be just before boiling so that those outer edges form little bubbles and we're going to pour it directly over the chocolate now, if you didn't cut the chocolate enough and you still have some pretty big pieces of chocolate like we did.

With the chocolate that was put on the cake, you can put it over a small pot of boiling water and that will help melt the last bits of chocolate. Of course, it will add to this and take a little longer to cool if you do, but you definitely want to make sure it's smooth and chunk-free or you'll regret it later, so it's worth taking a little extra time to get the results. correct. Look how nice and soft a couple of pieces are, just keep stirring. the cakes are cooling, the ganache has cooled to room temperature, so now we're going to start with the rest of the frosting first, we're going to take some butter, a lot of butter, now you want the butter to be a little soft, but even so. a little bit on the cold side so I took it out when I started the frosting and then when the ganache cooled enough to be ready for this step it was

perfect

and then we'll beat it until it really changes.

If you beat better long enough it will start to get lighter and thicker and if you are listening to your mixer you should hear it change a little, it's hard to understand. I'll show you now while I'm churning butter. In fact, I'm also going to add a little bit of corn syrup, as I mentioned in the past. Corn syrup is a stabilizer and helps with frostings, candies, sauces, marshmallows and things like that, so I recommend that you can skip it if you really don't like the idea, but it will end up with a better texture for your frosting if you do and really It's not much, now it's just two tablespoons, our butter and corn syrup mixture is thick and ribbony. delicious and it already looks like a nice thick frosting on its own, although it won't necessarily taste as good now that the butter is whipped and looks delicious, we're going to add a little bit of powdered sugar and this will continue to make it more like a buttercream and now We are going to add the ganache while beating over low heat.

Now you want to put it on high heat and whisk it now, as you can see it's too runny to be an effective frosting right now, so let's cool it down now, you can do it two ways: you can cool it for five minutes, feed it, cool it five minutes , feed it, chill it five minutes, speed it up, it'll take a couple of times and it's a really effective way to do it, or you can um and just chill it for about 30 minutes and then beat it, but it depends on your refrigerator and how cold it is already, It may cool down a little too hard and you may crack, so I prefer the five minute cool down speed. rack for minutes beach rack eminent speed until you're happy with the thickness and consistency but it's okay if you leave it for a little over five minutes or maybe you forget it like I usually do but don't leave it for too long or you'll have to let it get back to a little bit warmer so you can whip it effectively, it's done, look how thick it is, this will be great for the frosting, the frosting is ready, the cakes are baked, it's time. to bring it all together, so the first thing we're going to do is level our cakes, as you can see, using the even baked strips and having the metal in the center and adjusting the altitude, it actually already left the cake super level, but no. pretty perfect so this is worth doing, plus it will make all of our cakes the same height so on a good turntable and with a good serrated knife you will hold it at whatever height you want and just spin this is just our first little pass we're just marking the cake we're letting the turntable do the work for us after a circle you need to meet back up with your first line and if you did that means you were holding it long enough flat, so now you go a little bit deeper, you don't really have to do much work, the turntable does your job for you and it's perfect, and then I put the tops away and you can use them as a little bit or honestly, I just eat them.

They will last a long time in my house, remove some of the frosting and spread it. Now I love turntables, they are life changing when it comes to cake decorating and then repeat plop and frost now most cakes after they cool when you bake them. to shrink a little bit at the top so that the bottom is always the widest part, so as I go from bottom to bottom and bottom to bottom and the first two layers to the last layer, I turn it over and I have the bottom on top which gives me sharper corners and that wider point at the top of the cake and then you frost the top layer, like thisTake it off and spread it once more.

Now we're going to cross over the sides that you can use to pipe and then spread or just add and spread as you go. your spatula and knock down those corners and now the cake is even let's add another layer of frosting to make a messy frosting but now we know that every square inch is covered this cake is over in the working channels with women for their disgusting children matilda The musical number like chocolate cake is perfect in my opinion, so go and watch that, oh mmm, watch it as a quick final note. Thank you so much to everyone who has messaged me over the past few months as I have been a little mia one.

I took the summer to spend it with my kids I went to Harry Potter's world in Orlando I went to Disney's world with my kids and I had so much fun and I got inspired for so many fun recipes that I will bring you this year I also set up my kitchen as a live streaming studio, so every Wednesday I will come to you live with a live cooking show and then I will continue to do the edited content as well so leave me a comment below let me know if there is anything you would like to see. live or something you would like to see edited and of course what cake should I make next with this chocolate cake recipe.

Don't forget to send me photos or tag me on social media when you make something you've seen here, especially this. my favorite cake, I've really been nervous to share this with you, I hope you like it as much as I do and now, my favorite part, eat it, look how delicious it looks, look at that frosting and that cake so good. Greetings, seriously, very good, three two, oh, are you forgetting to subscribe? Joshua takes the best rest in the world, please.