What makes a perfect chocolate cake? Maybe the question isn’t top of mind heading into the holidays, with seating charts and general socioeconomic unrest to consider. I didn’t quite expect it to be at the top of mine amid an international move to Spain. But there I was, mid-autumn, standing in my Madrid kitchen, attempting to create the Platonic dessert.
I’ll explain. Back in August, I moved my family to Madrid for the year. I don’t know if you’ve ever moved your family across the world or tried to find somewhere to eat in Madrid in August. The latter is much harder. Temperatures climb over 100 degrees, public parks close, it’s considered unsafe to bring children outside. I spent our first week in Spain prowling the streets of our new neighborhood, Las Letras, with my son in tow, wishing desperately and futilely that any restaurant or market would open its metal grate. It was on one such prowl that I came across a sign, in clean sans serif lettering, advertising La Mejor Tarta de Chocolate del Mundo, or “The Best Chocolate Cake in the World”—both a boast and the name of the bakery.
The audacity of the phrase pursued me. I couldn’t shake the claim. I found myself occasionally muttering aloud: “But what would the best chocolate cake be?” And: “I need to know.” Strangers stared. “I’m going to find out,” I would murmur, perspiring heavily while continuing the search for a municipal pool.
Chocolate cake’s roots are definitively American, but the origin story is more transatlantic. Cacao beans were fermented and ground into chocolate drinks by the Olmecs in southern Mexico dating back to 1500 BC. The Mayans and Aztecs also frothed and drank it ceremonially. Hernán Cortés, a Spaniard, fresh from having laid waste to Aztec civilization and its peoples, brought cacao to Spain in 1528. He also brought Moctezuma’s recipe and, after some tinkering that involved sugar, a hot, sweet version quickly became the fashionable drink of the Spanish aristocracy. A chocolate drink is different from a chocolate cake, of course. Here, American ingenuity prevailed. In 1847 an American named Eliza Leslie published the first known recipe for a chocolate cake in her book The Lady’s Receipt Book. Yes, over in Vienna, 16-year-old Franz Sacher had invented a version a decade earlier. But Leslie’s approach was more democratic. “German chocolate cake” isn’t German, but American, named after Samuel German, who invented the dark baking chocolate it originally relied on.
That history was admittedly not much on my mind when we fled the heat of Madrid for a two-week vacation in Cantabria and Asturias—leaving the steaming streets and my cake obsession behind. So a month passed before, organizing an inaugural dinner for new friends, I remembered the best chocolate cake. I hurried several blocks to the store, which was now, quite miraculously, full of life, and ordered one. I chose blindly between predetermined cacao concentrations—53 or 70 percent—when the woman at the counter refused to answer my questions about which was “the best.”
On the evening of the dinner, I served flageolet beans I’d brought from Asturias, preserved peppers, fresh cheese from Burgos, and pork sausages. At dessert time, I opened the pretty brown box and sliced. I felt a surprising texture with my knife and then heard a crackle. Inspecting a cross section, I saw that the crunch came from layers of meringue. Sandwiched between was a darker chocolate cream, all of it topped with more glossy chocolate.
In my haste, I hadn’t asked what the cake was actually made of. It appeared to contain no flour. I passed out slices and was soon surrounded by unanimous murmurs of pleasure. I gazed around at forks being licked clean. It was too vulgar, in the moment, to ask if the cake deserved its title. What a ridiculous question, anyway. There were other things to talk about, like whether anyone had managed to download the school’s mobile app. As I washed the dishes, though, I found myself consumed. If it was the best chocolate cake in the world, I needed to know how to make it. Elbows deep in suds, I resolved to figure it out.
A good first step seemed to be to re-create what I’d served. La Mejor Tarta’s website lists the cake’s ingredients: Valrhona chocolate, butter, margarine, sugar, cocoa powder, and eggs. A Portuguese chef named Carlos Braz Lopes invented the confection in Lisbon in 1987 after he’d been inspired by a dessert at Fauchon in Paris. He opened eight branches of The Best Chocolate Cake in the World in the intervening years, in locales as diverse as Brazil and Switzerland. I wrote to Lopes, requesting the exact recipe, and headed out to my local Corte Inglés to buy the ingredients. Arms full of Valrhona chocolate, butter, sugar, and so on, I returned home to my computer, anticipating a reply. There was none.
On a well-known Spanish blog, I found a reconstructed recipe, whose photographs reflected a perfect resemblance to what I’d served. Onscreen, the result looked simple and slightly rustic and very delicious. I got to work. It’s hard to say exactly what went wrong when. It may have just been that my eggs weren’t the recommended size. Or that they were room temperature, not cold, when I whipped them. It is certainly a truth borne out by experience that “instant corn thickener” is not the same as cornstarch. My peaks would not stiffen. I had stalled on meringue, which was only step one.
On my second attempt, I left nothing to chance. That’s a lie: I left different things to chance than I had the first time. Have you tried to make a perfect circle by squeezing meringue out of a pastry bag? If not, you should practice. Also, I’ve been incredibly busy filing a lawsuit against the parchment paper company, who recklessly neglected to mention anywhere that their product is not nonstick. Belated research yielded advice to brush the parchment with vegetable oil (this is probably where the margarine comes in) before piping meringues. But who does research when they’re already on their second cake? I looked up “Is it dangerous to eat parchment?” The data is inconclusive.
I scraped off enough parchment paper from each layer of meringue to assemble a cake and serve a piece to my son, whose response was not inconclusive. “See, to me, this is not cake.” A worry that had been wallowing around my subconscious now swam to the surface: There may be substantial differences in what cuisines classify as a “cake.”
I called Jessica Battilana, cookbook author and staff editor at King Arthur Baking, to ask her opinion. “When you say ‘best chocolate cake,’ I think of a two- or four-layer chocolate cake with frosting between with a lovely plush crumb and a deep cocoa flavor.” If I’m honest, that was what I thought of too. I asked what Battilana would call the three layers of meringue and mousse I’d made. “I mean, we’re really splitting hairs,” she answered. “But it sounds to me like a vacherin.” I looked up “vacherin” and found dozens of photographs of what I’d just produced.
I had just begun to think that perhaps I knew no more about the perfect chocolate cake than a misguided Portuguese chef when Battilana mused: “I do like the idea of incorporating a meringue into a cake.” That sounded promising.
I placed a call to Paola Velez, chef of Washington, DC’s Providencia and author of Bodega Bakes, all of whose cakes I particularly admire. What did “the best chocolate cake” mean to her? “I like a fluffier cake, so I would introduce some water into the mixture.” This would turn to steam in baking and cause a high rise. “I would also use a neutral oil versus butter.” From there, Velez envisioned bold, personal choices. “Do you want to add some more texture? Add some light brown sugar. Do you want it just to be a very classic celebration cake? That’s granulated sugar. Do you want to be psycho and just do honey?” I didn’t. But her point was to consider your own preferences (within reason—this is baking, not cooking), even while making an iconic cake.
Looking for inspiration, I found myself lingering on a picture of a cake from the New York City bakery Lysée, located in the Flatiron neighborhood. I called its creator, chef Eunji Lee. “For Lysée, I make a chocolate sponge layer cake, but it’s 13 layers. At the bottom of the cake, we have a chocolate crunch, which adds a crispy texture, and then a layer of chocolate glaze on top. Inside, you have sponge cake, cream, sponge cake, cream, sponge cake, caramel….” She went on for a while but I was now lost in creative reverie. A vision was beginning to form.
I started by making a chocolate sponge (which is just plain cake) using water and oil, then another round of chocolate meringues, and another recipe of chocolate mousse, and another ganache. I laid out the components. I longed for the festivity of Lee’s 13 layers. But I worried that more layers meant making more cake. Then, I received a return call from legendary baker Dorie Greenspan, whose 15th cookbook, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, was published in October.
“The perfect chocolate cake,” she told me, “is really a case of memory.” While she was growing up in Brooklyn, Greenspan’s perfect cake was the blackout cake from the long-shuttered Ebinger’s Bakery. “It was made of two sponges,” she told me, “filled with chocolate pudding cream.” Greenspan’s reminiscence was all I needed. I sliced my two cakes horizontally into four layers. I laid down a round of meringue, topped it with cake, then mousse, then meringue, then mousse, then cake, then mousse, then meringue, then mousse, then cake, and poured chocolate ganache glaze over the top.
My cake totaled 11 layers, which wasn’t 13 but was satisfying. Once the ganache had set, I summoned my son. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “This is actually the best cake in the world.” The sentiment was echoed by his friend, his friend’s father, his friend’s mother, my husband, my doorwoman, and anyone else who happened to receive a slice. It won’t be perfect to everyone. That is, as Dorie Greenspan said, a matter of memory. But I recalled her parting words to me, as we’d gotten off the phone. “There are some memories that you don’t want to catch and keep,” she’d said. “But I would take that cake again.”