Chocolate Cakes
Devil’s Food Snacking Cake
At NYC's Mah-Ze-Dahr Bakery, Umber Ahmad and Shelly Acuna Barbera make one of the most perfect chocolate cakes ever: It's rich, moist and not too sweet, with a deeply chocolaty whipped ganache frosting.
1of25
Triple-Layer Sour Cream Chocolate Cake
This magnificent cake has three layers of moist, tender chocolate with a hint of cinnamon and a silky chocolate ganache.
2of25
Chocolate Blackout Cake
Pastry star Gale Gand layers her phenomenal, high-rising cake with an intensely chocolaty custard and coats it with cake crumbs.
3of25
Milk-Chocolate-Frosted Layer Cake
This cake from Karina Gowing is perfection for anyone who loves frosting. The ultracreamy icing, which is almost like a milk-chocolate ganache, gets spread liberally over layers of light, delicate, cocoa-flavored cake.
4of25
Mom's Chocolate Cake
This is a real old-fashioned American chocolate layer cake. It’s very moist, very chocolatey, a snap to make and best baked the day before serving. Marcia Kiesel acquired the recipe from her friend Joyce Cole, who got it from her mother.
5of25
Chocolate Cake
6of25
Sacher Torte
Sacher torte is a classic Austrian chocolate cake layered with apricot preserves. Lidia Bastianich’s version uses the preserves three ways: for moistening the cake layers, as a thick filling between the layers and as a glaze to seal the cake before covering it in chocolate. The cake is moist and luscious on its own, but it’s also delicious served the traditional way, with unsweetened whipped cream.
7of25
Chocolate-Red Wine Cake
A recipe in Anne Willan's 2001Cooking with Wineinspired this fluffy, not-too-sweet cake, which uses just enough wine in the batter to give it a slight boozy flavor.
8of25
Applesauce-Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake
Kristin Donnelly is devoted to her mother’s one-bowl Bundt cake because of its clove and cinnamon spices and its simplicity. As an exchange student in France, she even paid top dollar for chocolate chips and applesauce at an American market to make it for her host family. Today she adds a kick of black pepper to the batter and serves each slice with a cool-sour dollop of crème fraîche.
9of25
Chocolate S'mores Cake
San Francisco chocolatier Michael Recchiuti prepared the gooey marshmallow topping for this exquisite chocolate cake on a porch at Prather Ranch using just a hot plate and a hand-cranked beater. Recchiuti decorated the marshmallow with shards of his own graham crackers, but store-bought ones work just fine.
10of25
Deep Dark Chocolate Coconut Cake
Feeling blue? Have a slice of this cake. The chocolate and yogurt it's made with can supposedly boost levels of the feel-good brain chemical tyrosine.
11of25
Bittersweet Mocha-Pecan Roll
This amazing cake from author Alice Medrich is rich and chocolaty but also ethereal and soufflé-like.
12of25
Molten Chocolate Cake with Marshmallow Filling
More decadent thanmolten chocolate cake: one filled with warm marshmallow, reveals F&W”s Grace Parisi.
13of25
Fudgy Chocolate Layer Cake
Andrew Shotts Shotts is known for making his chocolates in small batches, creating appealing flavor combinations like mangopâte de fruit(jellied fruit paste) with passion fruit ganache. Here, he applies his talents to chocolate cake, mixing lots of buttermilk and coffee into the batter to create an incredibly moist, rich and fudgy dessert.
14of25
Double-Chocolate Bundt Cake with Ganache Glaze
Many Bundt cakes are heavy and buttery, but this one is surprisingly light and incredibly moist under its silky chocolate glaze. Strong-brewed coffee in the batter intensifies the chocolate flavor while cutting the sweetness.
15of25
Toffee Almond Crunch Cake
With its layers of tender chocolate cake and chocolaty sour cream frosting, this dessert on its own is completely spectacular. But Patti Dellamonica-Bauler takes it one step further by covering it in toasted almonds and crushed toffee candy.
16of25
Mini Chocolate-Hazelnut Cheesecakes
Grace Parisi breaks up whole, cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies in a food processor with hazelnuts and butter to create a supercrunchy crust for these delectable little cheesecakes. The cream filling in the cookies both sweetens the crust and prevents it from becoming too crumbly.
17of25
Triple-Layer Chocolate Macaroon Cake
François Payard layers chewy coconut cake with silky chocolate ganache. The beauty of the recipe is its simplicity: It has only six ingredients.
18of25
German Chocolate Cake
Sam German created the mild, dark baking chocolate called Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate in 1852; in the late 1950s, a Dallas newspaper published a recipe for German’s Chocolate Cake. The dessert took the South by storm and has been a staple ever since.
19of25
Warm Double-Chocolate Brownie Cakes
Brownie meets cake in this fun dessert from Emily Luchetti, a cookbook author and pastry chef. She bakes the batter in muffin cups so the edges turn crispy and chewy like a brownie, but the inside becomes soft and fluffy like a cake.
20of25
Double-Chocolate Layer Cake
“This is the most fabulous chocolate cake that I’ve ever made,” says Ina Garten, host of Food Network’sBarefoot Contessa. “It’s so easy and so moist and light. There's buttermilk and a cup of coffee in the batter! The frosting is just buttercream and a little coffee.”
21of25
Chocolate Soufflés with Crème Anglaise
“I love the simple elegance of chocolate soufflés,” Grace Parisi says. She uses top-quality chocolate from brands like Valrhona or Callebaut, which lends a deep, almost smoky flavor to the airy dessert. Tahitian vanilla beans—some of the world's best—add a floral sweetness to the crème anglaise.
22of25
Marble Cake with Chocolate Frosting
This layer cake recipe combines moist, spongy cake and frosting that’s a perfect balance between sweet and buttery.
23of25
Chocolate Cream Squares
This super-rich dessert contains chocolate whipped cream between layers of bittersweet chocolate cake topped with a fudgy chocolate glaze. It's best made one day ahead and refrigerated overnight.
24of25
Red Wine Chocolate Snack Cake
We all cook with red wine, adding a glug or two to enrich pan sauces and stews. Here, our culinary director Justin Chapple makes the case for baking with it as well. Cabernet Sauvignon adds fruity notes that brighten this chocolate cake, which is great for a midday snack or casual dessert.