#Black forest cupcakes martha stewart plus#

Maybe I can blame it on the fact that I don’t live in New Zealand, but I had never heard of the very funny and very talented Bernadette Gee before several people implored me to try her recipe during the last bake off. I think this cake was also boosted by a nice roasty coffee aftertaste, so people clearly preferred the taste of the coffee used in this cake. Compared to the others, this cake had a distinctly light and melt-in-your-mouth texture with a relatively more intense chocolate flavor (not super intense, but it tasted slightly darker and richer than other cakes). Clearly my small group of GoT fans agreed. I was actually quite thrilled that Bon Appetit took first this time around as this was one of my favorite cakes from the original bake off. However, I think there are still important textural insight to be had below! Analysis One key note: this mini bake off was somewhat off the cuff and while baking, I ran out of my usual coffee thanks to unpreparedness–so I had to swap in a different brand, which changed significantly changed the taste of several cakes. But here’s a mini chart of the average overall scores: Bon Appetit The tasting method for this experiment was much more casual–I brought the cakes to a Game of Thrones finale watch party and everyone who sampled the cakes wrote down their overall rating out of 10 on a piece of paper. This was, obviously, a far less scientific endeavor with a sample size of just 8. (Thank you to Valrhona for sending me samples to play with!!) Ingredients: Gold Medal all-purpose flour, Kroger butter, Borden’s cultured buttermilk, Adams imitation vanilla, Diamond kosher salt, Kroger sugar.Ĭhocolate ingredients: Valrhona Dutch-process cocoa powder, Ghiradelli natural cocoa powder, 70% Valrhona baking bars, 66% Valrhona feves. If you haven’t read through the original chocolate cake bake off post–I recommend doing so now for context! MethodologyĪll 7 recipes were made the day of, baked in 8″ Fat Daddio anodized aluminum cake pans and tasted plain.

Hershey’s (second place oil-based cake).

Bon Appetit (top oil/butter-based cake).

Foodess: nearly identical to Ina’s recipe, except it’s butter-based.

#Black forest cupcakes martha stewart plus#

Sarah Kieffer: nearly identical to Ina’s recipe, plus melted bittersweet chocolate.So one Sunday afternoon, I tested those recipes against a few control cakes: New cakes:

(Honestly, if you’re trying to kick an addiction to chocolate cake, just try baking 12 of them in one day, tasting all of them, and then eating a sizeable tupperware of leftovers for days after trying to foist half-eaten cakes on all your friends.)īut I couldn’t shake my curiosity on how a few key recipes that I had omitted from the bake off would fare against the rest of the contenders. After baking 12 chocolate cakes for the chocolate cake bake off, the last thing I wanted to do was bake more.