Soak Your Chocolate Cakes In This Popular Drink For Maximum Flavor

As far as classic desserts go, chocolate cake is a winner thanks to its simplicity and versatility. For example, there are many different styles of chocolate cake, like a limited-ingredient Depression-era version, or the Texas-Style sheet variety. You can decorate it to look fancy, too, applying almonds to the outside, like Julia Child's favorite. But if you really want to take your chocolate cake up a notch, consider these suggestions shared exclusively with Food Republic from Edmund McCormick, founder and CEO of Cape Crystal Brands (Specialty Food Ingredients): Soak your baked cake with sweetened coffee.

"Sweetened coffee not only introduces moisture," he shares, "it brings a note of bitterness and a touch of caramel-like sweetness that emphasizes the natural complexity in chocolate." 

That said, coffee-flavored syrup may be a no-go. "Straight syrup makes the cake wet but sweet, and straight espresso runs the risk of being too bitter or too sharp," offers McCormick. You also shouldn't use straight coffee; it should be sweetened with sugar to help in "suppressing coffee's bitterness, [which] prevents it from overpowering the finespun chocolate note," adds McCormick. Sweetened hot coffee, in McCormick's opinion, is the perfect middle ground, "promoting the cocoa flavors and giving taste more body and dimension."

Get ready to embrace your inner Michelangelo, because according to our expert Edmund McCormick, the best way to apply a coffee soak to a chocolate cake is to "apply with a pastry brush or squeeze bottle, [then] brush on the soak in a thin, even layer when the cake is still slightly warm." Administer the coffee in a thin, even layer, allowing it to soak into the cake slowly. According to McCormick, "...several light coats are better than one heavy coat." For spongier cakes, he recommended 1 to 2 tablespoons per cake slab.

There is also timing to consider, and this is of the utmost importance for the structural integrity of your cake. "Slather on the soak when [the] cake comes out of the oven and its edges have cooled, about 10–15 minutes," McCormick advises. He tells us that you do want to apply the coffee soak while the cake is still warm and "open-pored" enough to take in the coffee, but a fresh-out-of-the-oven cake will collapse with the additional liquid. He also recommends waiting at least 30 minutes after soaking to frost the cake, "so the flavors have time to distribute and the crumb has time to set."

Hot, sweetened coffee adds another taste dimension to chocolate cake, but both coffee and chocolate also work well with a variety of other flavored liquids, which you can brush on to further enhance your baked goods. McCormick suggests coffee liqueurs, like Kahlúa or Tia Maria, which enable you to "double down on the coffee and chocolate collaboration." He also recommends Frangelico and amaretto, nut-based liqueurs (in Frangelico's case, it tastes like hazelnuts; in amaretto's case, the taste of almonds comes from apricot pits), which imbue the cake with warmth and help bring out the cocoa nuts of the chocolate.

McCormick also has non-alcoholic proposals, too, including vanilla, hazelnut, and caramel flavored syrups, which add complexity, minus the liquor content. He is also a proponent of spiced syrups, flavored with cinnamon, cardamom, or even chili, as "they can add a whisper of heat, or just a touch of warmth, that takes a classic in a sophisticated direction." If you can't find any of these latter syrups, they're incredibly easy to make, so don't let that stop you from achieving moist cake flavor nirvana.