Add This To Your Chocolate Batter For The Richest Cake You've Ever Tasted

Chocolate cake loyalists know all of the tricks for baking the most moist, luxurious slice of cake. One well-known example is adding espresso powder, which perfectly complements the depth of the cake's chocolate flavor. There are even hacks to make boxed mix taste homemade, like using real dairy or adding sour cream to the batter. But there's another technique that works to enhance the richness of your cake batter: adding hot water.

It might not seem to be the obvious choice, but hot water is the ideal addition to chocolate cake batters containing cocoa powder. The act of combining cocoa powder and a hot liquid is called blooming. While the liquid can be a variety of things, including milk or melted butter, water is a great choice because its lack of flavor won't dilute the chocolatey-ness of the cake. Blooming helps the cocoa powder in your batter really emerge, resulting in richer, more chocolate-forward cakes. Additionally, blooming with water over other liquids might even give your cake a longer, moister shelf-life.

In boxed cake recipes that call for water, opt for hot water to capitalize on the benefits of blooming. If you're baking from scratch, you can treat blooming as a separate process; combine the water with the cocoa powder (as per the recipe), separate from the rest of the batter, and let it sit for a few minutes before adding to the batter.

Like many food-related hacks, the reason that blooming works comes down to science, and a specific interaction between different molecules. Cocoa powder has tons of compounds (aka, combinations of chemical elements), one of which is fats — a 8% to 26% fat content, more specifically. Fats, or lipids as they're often called, are hydrophobic, which means they don't combine easily with water ('hydro,' being water and 'phobic,' afraid). This is where the hot water comes into play. Adding hot water or another liquid can actually make those lipids a bit more soluble. Additionally, the hot water helps to release some of those amazing cocoa flavors that become more subtle because of the drying processes needed to create the powder. This is a very similar process to toasting or heating spices before using them in cooking, as heat helps activate richer and more complex flavors.

So, what kinds of recipes will the blooming process most benefit? Really, anything that includes cocoa powder and some sort of liquid addition. Blooming can achieve intense flavor in German chocolate cake, but you want to make sure you cool the cocoa powder and hot water mixture before adding it to the batter to avoid cooking your eggs. It could also add an extra chocolatey twist to our raspberry jelly take on Ina Garten's cake.