{"id":808051,"date":"2025-12-02T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=808051"},"modified":"2025-12-02T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T02:00:00","slug":"what-does-it-actually-take-to-make-the-best-chocolate-cake-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=808051","title":{"rendered":"What Does It Actually Take to Make The Best Chocolate Cake in the World?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Magazine<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What Does It Actually Take to Make The Best Chocolate Cake in the World?<\/h1>\n
By <\/span>Tamar Adler<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

December 2, 2025<\/p>\n

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    A FINE BALANCE<\/strong>
    \nA surprising degree of leeway can enter the precise art of baking, but certain ingredients must remain in the mix. Will Cotton, Insatiable,<\/em> 2008, polystyrene, acrylic polymer, pigment, gypsum. \u00a9 Will Cotton. Courtesy of the artist and Baldwin Gallery.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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    What makes a perfect chocolate cake? Maybe the question isn\u2019t top of mind heading into the holidays, with seating charts and general socioeconomic unrest to consider. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

    I\u2019ll explain. Back in August, I moved my family to Madrid for the year. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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,<\/em> or \u201cThe Best Chocolate Cake in the World\u201d\u2014both a boast and the name of the bakery.<\/p>\n

    The audacity of the phrase pursued me. I couldn\u2019t shake the claim. I found myself occasionally muttering aloud: \u201cBut what would the best chocolate cake be<\/em>?\u201d And: \u201cI need to know.\u201d Strangers stared. \u201cI\u2019m going to find out,\u201d I would murmur, perspiring heavily while continuing the search for a municipal pool.<\/p>\n

    Chocolate cake\u2019s 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. Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s, a Spaniard, fresh from having laid waste to Aztec civilization and its peoples, brought cacao to Spain in 1528. He also brought Moctezuma\u2019s 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\u2019s Receipt Book.<\/em> Yes, over in Vienna, 16-year-old Franz Sacher had invented a version a decade earlier. But Leslie\u2019s approach was more democratic. \u201cGerman chocolate cake\u201d isn\u2019t German, but American, named after Samuel German, who invented the dark baking chocolate it originally relied on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    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\u2014leaving 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\u201453 or 70 percent\u2014when the woman at the counter refused to answer my questions about which was \u201cthe best.\u201d<\/p>\n

    On the evening of the dinner, I served flageolet beans I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

    In my haste, I hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s mobile app. As I washed the dishes, though, I found myself consumed. If it was<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

    A good first step seemed to be to re-create what I\u2019d served. La Mejor Tarta\u2019s website lists the cake\u2019s 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\u2019d 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 Ingl\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    On a well-known Spanish blog, I found a reconstructed recipe, whose photographs reflected a perfect resemblance to what I\u2019d served. Onscreen, the result looked simple and slightly rustic and very delicious. I got to work. It\u2019s hard to say exactly what went wrong when. It may have just been that my eggs weren\u2019t 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 \u201cinstant corn thickener\u201d is not the same as cornstarch. My peaks would not stiffen. I had stalled on meringue, which was only step one.<\/p>\n

    On my second attempt, I left nothing to chance. That\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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\u2019re already on their second cake? I looked up \u201cIs it dangerous to eat parchment?\u201d The data is inconclusive.<\/p>\n