Make A Stand-Out Chocolate Cake With Two Unconventional Ingredients

If you're even a casual baker, you probably already have the ingredients in your kitchen for a pretty decent chocolate cake: cocoa powder, eggs, flour, and so on. But here's a hot tip — you probably also have the ingredients on hand for a really great chocolate cake. You just might not be storing them with the baking supplies.

One of these ingredients may seem counterintuitive. It's mayonnaise. But this may not be entirely surprising, given mayo's component parts (as well as its forgotten history in sweet preparations — chocolate mayonnaise, anyone?). As a high-fat combination of, chiefly, oil and eggs, it can do the work of both of those ingredients, providing an incredible richness and yielding a cake that's positively fudgy; oil-based cakes, generally, are moister and more tender than butter cakes. Plus it's affordable — in fact, mayo-based cakes gained popularity during World War II, when some other baking ingredients were rationed. So if you're craving a cake but you're out of eggs, just seek out a mayo chocolate cake recipe.

That other key component? It's coffee, which may not even register as such in the finished cake — coffee simply works to enhance the cake's chocolatiness, subtly introducing nutty, earthy notes that beautifully round out the bitter cocoa flavors. You can add hot brewed coffee to the batter if that's what the recipe calls for, but another — frankly better — option is instant espresso powder, which adds a coffee note without throwing off the balance of wet and dry ingredients.

This may sound obvious, but if you're following a recipe for mayo chocolate cake, make sure you're using plain mayo. Nothing labeled low-fat, and leave that spicy mayo for sandwiches. Olive-oil mayo could introduce a flavor you may or may not want — chocolate and olive oil do play well together. But for straightforward results, stick with a neutral product like Hellman's or that old Southern favorite, Duke's mayonnaise. Duke's is also a bit more acidic, which will enhance the cake's sweetness. The fact that mayo is an emulsified mixture of oil and egg, further, means it'll do an exceptional job coating the flour in the batter, producing a more tender cake.

Espresso powder is another ingredient that can turn a good dessert into a stellar one. If your recipe calls for brewed coffee, go with that; but if you want to seriously improve a coffee-less chocolate cake, turn to espresso powder, which has a bolder, richer flavor than instant coffee. How much you add is up to you. Start with a half-teaspoon or a teaspoon if you don't want any pronounced coffee flavor, adding two to four teaspoons for more explicit mocha notes. Another benefit is that you can just mix this stuff in with the rest of the dry ingredients; instant coffees have been engineered to be easily soluble, so no extra steps are required. At this point it's simple math: two easy tweaks, one incredible cake.