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Dark Chocolate Olive Oil Cake is almost as easy to make as a box cake, and yet the results are well outside the box.

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This is miLam’s spin on a “hot water chocolate cake”. You might not be familiar with that term, but you’re probably familiar with this kind of cake. Deep, dark, chocolate; the perfect combination of airiness and richness, and very moist. It’s the kind of cake often used to make chocolate cupcakes, the kind of cake that box cakes emulate. In our version, olive oil gives the cake a beautifully tender crumb, while lending depth to the chocolate flavor. This cake comes together nearly as easily as a box cake, requiring about the same easy level of skill and know-how. It can be tricky to produce a moist cake from scratch, but you won’t have that problem here. The real benefit you’ll get in making this cake outside the box is flavor; you just won’t find a box cake with this kind of depth, richness, and nuance.

To frost this cake, we recommend McCormick’s “Chocolate Fudge Frosting,” which is what we used for this photograph. It’s a buttercream/cream cheese hybrid. Not as sweet as a buttercream, but just as creamy. Not as heavy as a sour cream or cream cheese frosting, but with just a touch of that tang. It also has a hint of cinnamon that most people will probably not identify as such, but instead will register as a bit of nuance to the chocolate flavor.

For the cake, use an oil that you’d cook with. Let the frosting’s butter and cheese soften while you prep the cake. Very much like its box-cake cousins, Dark Chocolate Olive Oil Cake is clearly at its best as soon as its cooled and frosted. It maintains its fantasticosity for a full 24 hours, and then begins a long, slow decline into moral turpitude that ends with you asleep on the couch and chocolate crumbs everywhere.

Dark Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

Yield: One 3-layer 8-inch cake

Ingredients:

13⅜ oz. cake flour (3 cups or so) + ½ oz. cornstarch (2 Tbs) • 15½ oz. sugar (2 cups) • 2¼ oz. Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder (¾ cup) • 2 tsp baking soda • 1 tsp salt • 2 large eggs (3½ oz.) • 8 oz. buttermilk (1 cup) • 8 oz. olive oil (1 cup) • 1½ tsp vanilla • 8 oz. boiling water (1 cup)

Directions:

1. Grease and flour three 8″ pans. Magic strips are of no use against this cake’s Viagra-like ability to rise, so don’t bother.
2. Put some water on to boil. It’ll boil before you need it. When it does, turn it off and leave it covered.
3. Preheat to 300°F. Use an oven thermometer.
4. Whisk dry ingredients in stand mixer.
5. Paddle in eggs, buttermilk, and vegetable oil until thoroughly blended, ramping up to med speed and sustaining it for about 30 seconds. Let the batter rest as you bring the water back to the boil and measure it out.
6. Add vanilla to boiling water and stir it into the batter until thoroughly blended, about 15 seconds on low-to-med low speed.
7. Pour into pans and bake for about 25- 30 minutes, or when a toothpick comes out with a few crumbs. The window is quite short; the cakes will go from “wet toothpick” to “dry toothpick” in a matter of a minute. The cakes should not crack (although they will if you over-bake them). They should pull back from the sides of the pans only while they’re cooling.
8. Cool for 10 minutes. Run a toothpick – the same one you used as a tester … don’t be wasteful – around the edges of each cake before tipping them out of their pans. Cool completely on racks.
9. Choose the prettiest dome for the top layer. Choose the thinnest one for the middle layer, and use a serrated knife to saw off its dome. Invert the remaining cake and use it as the bottom layer, stabilizing it with pieces of the sliced-off dome.

Chocolate Fudge Frosting Recipe

Ingredients:

10 1/2 oz. (2¼ cups) confectioners’ sugar • 3/4 oz. (¼ cup) unsweetened cocoa powder • ¼ tsp cinnamon, ground • 6 oz. (¾ package) cream cheese, softened • 6 oz. (¾ cup, as in 1½ sticks) butter, softened • 8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate • 1 Tbs vanilla extract

Abbreviated Directions:

1. Melt chocolate.
2. Mix sugar, cocoa, cinnamon.
3. Beat cream cheese and butter until smooth, ramping up to mid-high and sustaining it for about 30 seconds. Blend in cocoa mixture, low speed. Blend in chocolate a bit at a time, then vanilla.

For full directions, visit McCormick.

Mary’s Dark Chocolate Olive Oil Cake

My cousin Mary put her own spin on this cake by baking it in two thick layers instead of three, and adding ¼-cup of Kahlua to the frosting.

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Credit for “Mary’s” cake, Mary Piontek. All other images, Make It Like a Man! Hover image and/or green text to reveal hidden wisdom. Click for immediate enlightenment.

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