Chocolate Fudge Cake
A dark, damp chocolate cake mixed with oil and hot coffee, under a fudge icing that stays soft enough to give under the knife.
- Prep
- 30 min
- Cook
- 30 min
- Resting
- 1 hr 30 min
- Total
- 2 hr 30 min
- Serves
- 12
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Eggs
- Milk
- Soya
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Sponge
Fudge icing
Method
Sponge
Heat the oven to 170C/340F.
Butter two 20cm round tins and line the bases with discs of baking paper.
Whisk the flour, cocoa, caster sugar, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and fine salt together in a large bowl, breaking up any lumps of cocoa against the side with the whisk.
Whisk the eggs, buttermilk, oil and vanilla together in a jug.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk until smooth.
Pour in the hot coffee and whisk again.
Expect a batter closer to pouring cream than to cake mixture. That is right, and it is where the damp crumb comes from; thickened up with more flour it bakes as an ordinary dry chocolate sponge.
Use boiling water instead if you would rather. The heat is doing the work rather than the coffee: hot liquid disperses cocoa properly, where cold liquid leaves it dusty and the cake tastes flat.
Divide the batter between the tins.
Bake for 28-32 minutes, until the tops spring back when pressed lightly and a skewer comes out with a few dry crumbs and no wet batter.
Judge it by the spring and the skewer rather than by how it looks through the door. A batter this loose still reads as underdone at the moment it is ready.
Cool in the tins for 15 minutes, then turn out onto a rack and peel off the paper.
Cool the sponges completely, at least an hour. Fudge icing on a warm cake slides straight off the sides and pools on the plate.
Fudge icing
Melt the chopped chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, keeping the base of the bowl clear of the water.
Lift the bowl off the pan and leave the chocolate for 10 minutes, until it is warm rather than hot.
Beat the softened butter on its own for 2 minutes, until pale and creamy.
Beat in the icing sugar in three additions, keeping the mixer on low until each one is absorbed.
Beat in the double cream and the fine salt.
Pour in the cooled chocolate and beat for a minute, until the icing is dark, glossy and thick enough to hold a ridge.
Never add chocolate that is still hot. It melts the butter, the icing splits into an oily puddle with grit suspended in it, and no amount of further beating brings it back.
Set one sponge on a plate and spread a third of the icing over it.
Set the second sponge on top.
Spread the rest of the icing over the top and sides, working it into swirls with a palette knife rather than smoothing it flat.
Leave the cake at room temperature for 30 minutes to let the icing firm.
Keep it out of the fridge. Cold sets the butter in the icing hard and the cake eats waxy, and a fudge icing is meant to give under the knife.
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What to expect
- Taste
Deeply bitter-sweet, and the balance is between two different chocolates doing different jobs. The sponge is cocoa: dry-edged, faintly acidic, more bitter than sweet on its own despite the sugar in it. The icing is real chocolate and butter, so it is rounder, fattier and much sweeter. Salt runs through both and is doing more work than it appears to — without it the whole thing reads as flat sugar. There is no fruit note and no acidity in the finish, which is why a mouthful is filling rather than moreish.
- Aroma
Cocoa and hot sugar out of the oven, dark and dusty rather than sweet. The finished cake smells much less strongly, because the icing is cool and cocoa butter gives up very little aroma below body temperature; the smell arrives in the mouth rather than in the room.
- Texture
The point of the cake. The crumb is damp and slightly dense, soft enough to compress under a fork with no crumbling and no dryness at the back of the throat — the fault this recipe exists to avoid. The icing is completely different: smooth, cool, fatty and heavy, and it gives under the knife rather than cracking. Nothing anywhere in the cake is crisp, and that is deliberate.
- Sound
Nothing, except the palette knife dragging through the icing, which is a soft, thick sound and one of the more satisfying noises in baking.
- How the flavour moves
The icing arrives first because it is on the outside — sweet, fat and rounded, with the chocolate reading as smooth rather than sharp. The sponge follows and is markedly drier and more bitter, which is the contrast the two-part construction is for. Salt comes up in the middle and holds through. The finish is long, bitter and slightly drying, and it lasts a surprisingly long time; a second slice is much less appealing than the first, which is the honest thing to say about this cake.
- Serve it
Room temperature and nothing colder. Refrigeration sets the butter in the icing hard and it eats waxy, and cold flattens cocoa's flavour badly. If the cake has been in the fridge it needs half an hour out of it.
- Goes with
Cold milk, black coffee, or nothing. Cream cuts it. A raspberry alongside does more for it than any other fruit because acidity is the one thing the cake has none of.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy. The batter is whisked in one bowl and the only place it can go wrong is the icing.
- Cost
Moderate. Cocoa powder and dark chocolate are the two real costs.
- Equipment
Two 20cm round tins, a large bowl and a whisk, and an electric whisk for the icing. No creaming and no folding, so no mixer is needed for the cake itself.
- When to make it
Birthdays, and any occasion where a cake has to be made a day ahead.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The tops lose their shine and take on a matte, slightly cracked look. The edges pull very slightly from the tin. Because the batter is dark, colour tells you nothing at all here, which is why the spring test matters more than usual.
- And it feels like
The top springs back with no dent when pressed lightly in the centre, and a skewer comes out with a few dry crumbs on it. A wet skewer means three more minutes.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual.
- Where it goes wrong
- Adding more flour because the batter looks too thin. It is supposed to look too thin.
- Beating the melted chocolate into the butter while it is still hot, which splits the icing irretrievably.
- Icing a cake that is still warm, so the icing runs off the sides.
- Judging doneness by colour, which is impossible on a cake this dark.
- Keeping it in the fridge, which makes the icing waxy and flattens the cocoa.
- If it does go wrong
Split, oily icing with grit in it: the chocolate was too hot. It can sometimes be brought back by chilling the bowl for ten minutes and re-beating hard, but not reliably. Icing too soft to hold a swirl: the kitchen is warm, so chill it 15 minutes and beat again. Sponge sunk in the middle: underbaked, or too much bicarbonate of soda. Sponge dry: overbaked, or extra flour was added to the thin batter. Cake tastes of coffee: the coffee was too strong, and water is the answer next time.
- Making it ahead
Better made a day ahead. The sponges can be baked two days before and kept wrapped, or frozen.
- Keeping it
In a tin at room temperature for four days, and it is genuinely better on the second day than the first. Not in the fridge.
- Reheating
None, but a slice that has been refrigerated needs 30 minutes at room temperature before it eats properly.
- Freezing
The unfrosted sponges freeze well wrapped, for three months. The iced cake can be frozen but the icing loses its gloss.
- Leftovers
Keeps better than most cakes because of the oil. Crumbled into cold cream it makes a passable trifle layer.
- Scaling it
Halves into a single 20cm tin for a one-layer cake with about half the icing. Doubling is awkward — bake it as four thin layers rather than two deep ones, because this batter is too loose to cook evenly at depth.
- Substitutions
Buttermilk can be replaced with 250ml whole milk soured with 1 tbsp lemon juice and left 10 minutes, or with plain yoghurt let down with milk. The acid matters — it is what the bicarbonate of soda reacts with. Dutch-process cocoa gives a darker, milder cake; natural cocoa gives a redder, sharper one and slightly more lift.
- Dietary swaps
Contains cereals containing gluten, eggs, milk and soya, the last from the lecithin in most chocolate. Vegetarian. The sponge alone is very close to dairy free — swapping buttermilk for an acidulated plant milk gets it there — but the fudge icing is butter, cream and chocolate and cannot usefully be made dairy free.
- Shopping for it
A cocoa powder worth eating on its own makes a visible difference to the sponge. Dutch-process for a darker, smoother cake; natural for a sharper, redder one.
- Keeping the cost down
A supermarket own-brand 60% chocolate is fine here; it is beaten with butter and a great deal of icing sugar and a fine bar's subtleties would be lost anyway. Spend on the cocoa instead, which is tasted directly.
- Sustainability
Cocoa and chocolate are the two ingredients in this collection where sourcing has a real human cost behind it, and a certified bar and tin of cocoa are worth the difference.
- Nutrition
Rich. The icing carries most of the fat and most of the sugar.
- Worth it?
The chocolate cake to make when it has to be made the day before, and the one that most rewards not correcting the batter.
Where it comes from
- Origin
The United States, for the form. The name is used interchangeably in Britain and America.
- Also called
Chocolate fudge cake. Devil's food cake is a related but distinct American cake, usually redder and made with natural cocoa and more bicarbonate of soda.
- What the name means
Fudge refers to the icing rather than to the cake: a chocolate icing beaten with butter and sugar to a soft, spreadable consistency that never sets hard, as distinct from a poured ganache or a set glacé icing.
- History
Chocolate layer cakes become possible on a domestic scale once cocoa powder is cheap and standardised, which follows the Dutch alkalising process of the 1820s and the industrialisation of cocoa processing through the nineteenth century. American cookbooks carry chocolate layer cakes from the second half of that century. The oil-and-hot-liquid method used here is twentieth century and was popularised through American home baking, in company recipe leaflets among other routes.
- Why it matters
A birthday cake and a restaurant dessert rather than a formal or festival cake. In Britain it is the default chocolate cake on a pub or cafe menu.
- When it is eaten
Birthdays, and anywhere a cake needs to be recognisably chocolate at a glance.
- The traditional way
Beating the fat into the icing sugar and chocolate rather than pouring a ganache, which is what makes a fudge icing rather than a glaze.
- How it changed
The move from creamed butter to oil, and from cold milk to hot coffee or water, are both twentieth-century changes and both aimed at the same thing: a damper crumb that survives a day.
- Regional variations
American devil's food, German chocolate cake and British chocolate fudge cake are separate cakes that get conflated. The version here is the plain dark layer cake with fudge icing.
- How this version differs
Oil and hot coffee rather than creamed butter and milk, and a lower oven at 170C, all of them chasing a damp crumb rather than a light one.
- Sources and credit
None available.
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