Appears in Cook's Illustrated July/August 1994
Starting with a Velvet Devil's Food Cake, the author tests each ingredient to produce the best six chocolate cake recipes, from a sour cream layer cake to a low-fat, low-guilt variation.
While developing our chocolate layer cake recipe we found very little difference between cakes baked with standard American cocoa and “Dutched” cocoa. We chose water over milk or buttermilk to moisten our cake batter, discovering that cakes...