The devil’s food cake: a frightening amount of flavour

Chocolate cake comes in many different guises: from the dark and rich, to the sweet and simple. For me, it’s not like the ultimate cookie, or the perfect brownie: I don’t believe that there is one, definitive chocolate cake. I do not spend my days searching for the platonic version; trying to rank a chocolate fudge cake above or below a a cream-filled Yule log or a chocolate chunk-studded, plain loaf cake is like comparing apples and oranges.

I think, instead, that there is a perfect chocolate cake for every mood. For a party, I want something crowd-pleasing, sweet and tender, with old-fashioned milk chocolate icing; it must cut cleanly, and not crumble. If it’s mid-morning, and I’m already thinking about chocolate cake, it’s probably a dinky little Swiss roll, one of those kid sized ones that comes individually wrapped, and sits in my cupboard, just waiting for its rightful place, next to my 11 o’clock coffee. Sometimes I want a tall, thin slice of something impossibly indulgent, sometimes I want something I can have two (and a half) slices of without feeling queasy. Some days I want it with caramel, or malt, or peanut butter. If I’m by myself, I just want a slab of Nigella’s chocolate, tahini and banana loaf.

The devil’s food cake is its own category: richer than most other chocolate cakes, thanks to a high proportion of melted chocolate in the mixture. It’s a layered cake, with those thick layers of damp sponge sandwiched with an equally rich and thick icing. This is quite a grown-up cake. Put it this way: it’s not going to be replacing Colin the Caterpillar at children’s parties any time soon. But if you want a beautiful and impressive cake to serve on elegant plates to those with slightly more mature palates (no disrespect to Colin; as aforementioned, there is a time and a place for him), then this is the cake for you.