Fudge Cake

Ingredients

The Creamed:

• 8 tbsp (113 g) unsalted butter (65-70°F)
• 383 g brown sugar

The Wet Goods:

• 3 large (150 g) eggs
• 1 cup (227 g) sour cream (full fat)
• 1½ tsp vanilla extract

The Dry Goods:

• 85 g unsweetened baking chocolate
  • only get about 40-50 g of chocolate dust from a 113 g bar, so buy 2-3 bars.
• 305 g all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt

The Boiling Water:

• 1 cup (227 g) water (boiling)

Recipe

• Place an oven rack in upper middle part of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

• Grease or line your baking tins.

• Chop the unsweetened chocolate finely enough to pass through a sieve. A food processor is definitely the easiest way to do this.

  • It helps to put the chocolate in the freezer for 15-30 min before chopping it. You can also freeze the chocolate half-way through chopping it if it starts to get too pliable.

• Combine all the dry goods ingredients.

• Whisk together the wet ingredients.

• Cream together all the remaining ingredients, except the boiling water, alternating 3 doses of the dry goods with 2 does of the wet. Briefly:

  • Beat the butter for ≈1 min to spread it around the bowl.

  • Slowly add sugar, while continuing to beat, until the mixture becomes light and fluffy.

  • Reduce the mixing speed to the slowest setting, then add the dry and wet ingredients in alternating batches.

• Add the boiling water and continue stirring until there are no lumps. This step will melt all the chocolate, so long as it was chopped finely enough.

• Pour the batter into the prepared tin. Bake at 350°F for 30 min, then reduce the oven temperature to 300°F and bake until internal temperature reaches 175-180°F (20-30 min). At this point, a toothpick inserted at the half-radius will come out clean, but a toothpick inserted in the center will not.

• Let the cake sit in its tin for at least 15 min before turning it out onto a cooling rack. Let it cool completely (and maybe even freeze it a little bit) before frosting.

Notes

• The dough is very runny; that's how it's supposed to be.

• This recipe claims to make enough for a 9x3" round cake pan or a 9x13x2" rectangular cake pan. Those are volumes of 191 in³ and 234 in³, respectively. For my three-tiered cake, the layers will be 10", 8", and 6" in diameter. That adds up to 236+151+85=471 in³ of total volume, 2.45x more than a 9" round pan and 2.01x more than a 9x13x3" rectangular pan. I think I can get away with just doubling the recipe.

  Update: If I want three layers in each tier, I probably need to triple the recipe. That will make it impossible to fit the entire thing in the bowl of my stand mixer (even the double recipe didn't quite fit), so I might have to make the dough in batches.

• Bring an oven thermometer. I don't wanna get fucked by an oven I'm not familiar with. And don't forget to check the cakes once or twice before the full baking time, because I don't want to end up with dry cake.

• Line the baking tins with parchment paper. Oiling the pans doesn't seem to work very well; I think the dough is too liquid and the oil gets displaced.

• I suspect that its important to use (i) high-quality chocolate (ii) chopped very finely. I use Ghirardelli, Lindt, or equivalent.

2022/07/08:

• Halving this recipe is almost perfect for the 6" cake.

• I used 90% chocolate this time, because the store didn't have any unsweetened. It tasted just as good.

2023/07/07:

• The oven at 94A Marion can't really get below 400°F. As a result, I really overbaked the cake. If I use this oven again, I'll need to very carefully monitor the temperature, and probably bake for less time at the lowest possible temperature.

2023/07/15:

• The 8" cake was done after 10 min at 300°F. The 6" cake was already overbaked by then. I should probably get in the habit of checking the temperature after the 350°F bake.