Rick Makes Chocolate Blackout Cake

Feel like I've said sugar a lot just now.

Brown sugar, pillowy sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar

[Producer] It is your catchphrase.

I am Sugarman.

[mellow music]

I am going to make blackout cake.

There is a, or there was,

a bakery called Ebinger's in Brooklyn.

It opened around 1906

and they were famous for this blackout cake.

So it's a really rich devil's food cake

that had layers of dense pudding

and then was topped with a ganache frosting.

It got its name because

during World War II they would literally turn off

all of the electricity to Brooklyn

so that the battleships leaving New York Harbor

would leave undetected.

The first thing we're gonna do

is we're gonna start with the cake.

I am going to butter two eight inch cake pans.

If you have some extra parchment lying around

you may want to just cut a couple of rounds

and throw them in, just as an insurance policy

that nothing's gonna stick.

I'm using a pastry brush,

you can use your hands.

My mom used to use a piece of paper towel,

whatever works.

And I just have a little bit of extra cocoa powder,

you only need a couple of tablespoons.

It's just for ensuring that the cake doesn't stick.

You could use flour,

but I feel like since you're making a chocolate cake

you might as well use more cocoa.

You want as thin a layer of the cocoa as possible.

It's only there to make sure that the cake

pops out of the pan easily.

It's gonna give you a really nice, dark finish

around the edges of the cake,

which I also really like.

Okay, so our pans are ready.

We are going to start by sifting all of the dry ingredients.

AP flour,

Dutch-processed cocoa.

I really like the flavor and the richness

of Dutch-processed cocoa.

It's not an even swap for regular cocoa.

And then I have baking powder and baking soda.

And just give that a little sift.

Honestly, in baking, this is one of the few times

that I actually still sift things.

The cocoa does tend to clump

and you'll get to the bottom and you'll see these little,

almost like stones of cocoa.

And you can just push those through.

All right,

that is nicely mixed.

This is not your really quick and easy

chocolate birthday cake,

this is something that you are going to

have to dedicate probably a full day to do.

So I have a whole egg and a yolk,

vanilla extract,

kosher salt

and five tablespoons of veg oil.

I'm going to give this a little whisk,

break up the yolks.

This is fresh brown sugar,

it should be really soft,

it should feel like wet sand.

There is a way to revive brown sugar.

You can transfer it to an airtight container

and put a slice of bread into the container

and literally after one night,

the moisture from the bread

will actually infuse into the sugar

and you'll get nice, soft, pillowy sugar again.

So I'm putting a cup and a half of dark brown sugar.

And we just wanna whisk this in.

Make sure there's no big clumps of sugar in there.

Okay, that looks good.

This is so fun, I love cakes like this.

Just dump it all in at once.

I'm gonna give this a little stir,

just to get the flour and the cocoa wet.

This is hot water.

It's gonna help make the cocoa bloom.

You wanna whisk this until it looks smooth.

You can see now it's a little bit lumpy.

As you whisk it it'll start to get really glossy

and shiny and that's what you want.

It'll start to kind of look like melted chocolate.

All right, that is looking really good.

So now I'm just gonna eyeball this.

We wanna divide the batter in half.

Normally I would actually weigh it out

but it is doubtful that anyone is going to do that at home

and I actually probably wouldn't do it at home either, so.

[whooshing]

And these will get baked in 350 degree oven

for about 25 to 35 minutes.

All right.

So while the cakes are baking

I'm gonna do the pudding.

Which actually is honestly

my favorite part of the whole recipe.

The first thing we're gonna do is

we're going to whisk up the cocoa.

So this is more Dutch-processed cocoa,

'cause it's yummy.

And then cornstarch

and that's gonna be our thickening.

I'm gonna give this a little whisk,

just to combine them

and also if there's any little clumps of chocolate or cocoa,

they'll break those up.

And I'm gonna add in the cream.

It's just gonna help keep a nice, smooth texture.

We're gonna bloom up both the cornstarch

and the cocoa powder.

That looks good.

It's okay if there are a couple of lumps in there.

All right, so we're gonna add whole milk.

And so I'm doing everything off flame right now.

Like, in a lot of pudding recipes

you would do all of this in a bowl

and then transfer it to a pot

and then bring it up to a boil.

I wanted to make this as easy as possible,

so we're just gonna pretend

like this pot is our mixing bowl.

I've got four egg yolks.

That's gonna give us richness.

[Producer] You do actually have the flame on.

I do?

Oh, shit.

[bleep]

So off flame we're gonna add a little salt.

I've got some more dark brown sugar.

I love dark brown sugar and chocolate.

The molasses and the caramel flavors

and a little bit of smokiness

complements the deep, dark, rich flavors of the chocolate.

And now I'm going to

put this on medium high.

Bring this to a boil.

This is definitely something

you don't want to walk away from,

it's not gonna boil over

because of the cornstarch,

but it will burn rather quickly

and there's really no way to save it.

Once the cornstarch and the chocolate

burns on the bottom of the pan,

you pretty much have to start over again.

All right, starting to thicken

so I'm gonna reduce to low.

You just wanna whisk.

You'll see some lumps, it'll look a little broken.

But the more you whisk, the lumps will go away.

You wanna keep doing this for about a minute or two,

just until you don't see a lot of lumps.

We're gonna strain it just to get

any errant lumps outta there,

but you can see,

it just looks like really beautiful pudding.

It's funny because a lot of components in this recipe

require a great deal of faith

that it's actually going to work, this being one of them.

It'll look really broken in the beginning,

but, you know, give it a minute or two

and just whisk.

This is looking really good and thick.

It's the consistency of pudding.

It will thicken up as it sets.

Now, as if that wasn't enough,

we've got some milk chocolate

and some vanilla extract.

And then you just wanna whisk it until

all the chocolate has melted

and no streaks of the milk chocolate remain.

So now we're gonna take this over and strain it.

You definitely wanna do this while the pudding is still hot

because it will thicken up fairly quickly.

If you don't want to strain it you really don't have to

but this is just another little insurance policy

that you're gonna get really smooth, beautiful pudding.

I'm gonna save this pot so that I can lick it later.

And then just push the pudding through the sieve.

Oh my god, I love this pudding so much.

And that is it.

And now I'm going to cover it with plastic.

This is really important because

if I just put this in the refrigerator like this,

or even if I just left this at room temp,

you'll get a skin that forms on the top of the pudding.

So push the plastic down onto the surface of the pudding.

You're basically creating a little airtight barrier.

You won't get a skin on the top

and then when you pull it off after it's chilled

and you whisk it,

you won't have any little clumps of pudding skin,

which is kinda gross.

Now that it's covered

we're gonna chill this for about three to five hours

until it's really cold

and then we will sandwich it between our cake layers.

While the, what's happening?

While the pudding's chilling

I'm gonna make the magic frosting.

So I say magic because it's really stupidly simple

and sort of unbelievable.

And every time I make it I kind of wonder,

is this really gonna work?

And then it does.

So I am going to bring to a boil

heavy cream, a little salt, and this is golden syrup.

I love golden syrup.

It's like a really mild version of a molasses.

You still get the cane flavor

and a little bit of the caramel.

I'm gonna turn this up to medium high.

And I'm gonna whisk this and talk at the same time.

The pudding is really, really sweet

because I'm using milk chocolate.

I wanted to give a nice counterpoint.

We've got the dark chocolate

and we've also got sour cream for a little tang

to cut through the pudding.

So we can just let that come to a boil.

All right, so I just turned this off.

We came to a boil

now we wanna add our chocolate

and sour cream

and butter.

We just wanna gently stir this,

melt the butter, melt the chocolate,

incorporate the sour cream.

This is definitely something you don't wanna do on heat,

there's enough residual heat in here.

You can see it's almost completely melted.

I don't even think I'm gonna need the whisk.

It's really good just like that.

It's beautiful, it's smooth, it's pillowy.

I know you're probably thinking,

how is that gonna be frosting?

Well, just you wait.

[magical chiming]

All right, so we want to transfer this to a bowl

we just need to get it out of the pan

and help it cool a little bit faster.

And we're gonna let this sit for about and hour and a half,

we're gonna stir every 30 minutes

and magically it will thicken up

to the consistency of this.

And it's really strange.

In about 30 minutes it will start looking like pudding,

then it'll get a little thicker.

At an hour and half you will get this.

This is basically the end consistency that you want

for the spreading onto the cake.

It's really important that these cakes

are definitely room temperature before you do this

because if you, if they're even the slightest bit warm

and you try and cut them

they're just gonna gum up

and you're gonna get a really jagged edge.

Give that a little tap.

There you go.

We're just going to reinvert this onto the sheet tray.

We'll do the same with this guy.

I'm going to invert this one onto the cake stand.

Okay, so we're gonna cut both of these layers in half

and we're actually only going to use

three of the layers for the cake itself.

The ugliest layer we're going to crumble it up

and use it for the crumb coating around the sides.

The way that I normally do it

if you don't have a turntable, [record scratches]

basically you just look for halfway

make a little mark like that

and then you can just kind of

turn the cake stand around like that,

or the cake, whichever's easier.

If you just keep turning it around and around

you will go through the center of the cake

just like that.

We'll do the next one.

This one I think I'm gonna go all the way through.

It's nice and cool.

All right, I think that

this is probably our ugly layer.

So you can crumble this in a number of different ways.

You can just do it by hand

or, the more fun part is pretend this is a box grater

and just rub it around like that.

You want really fine crumbs.

Okay, as you can see,

this is what your finished crumb looks like.

Right now it's really super moist.

It's okay if it dries out a little bit

because we're just going to stick this

to the side of the cake.

This is the chilled pudding.

And you want to, before you start spreading this on,

you want to give it a little whisk,

just to make sure.

You can see it's super thick.

You want to whisk it to get it loose enough to spread.

So we're gonna start with this layer.

And it's okay if it's not completely smooth.

Nice thing about this cake is,

not only tastes good,

but it's actually really super easy to decorate

and it's also very forgiving.

So we want to take half of the pudding.

You don't wanna go all the way out to the edge

because when you put the other layer on top

it's going to push the pudding out a little bit.

Now we're gonna take another layer.

We're gonna put this cut-side down.

The pudding's gonna start to ooze,

which is why you don't wannna

come all the way out to the edges.

And if it's not completely level

you can use the pudding

to kind of level the next layer on top.

So the pudding thickens as it chills

so if this were room temp

it would be too liquidy to spread like this.

This layer is pretty smooth and flat

so I'm actually going to put the flatter side up

and the rounder side down.

That'll give us a nice, level surface on the top

and now the crucial step here is to chill the cake.

All right, so.

We put this in the fridge about an hour ago

and really what we're trying to do

is just firm up the pudding

so you can see it's not sticking to my finger anymore,

that's kind of what you want.

And then we're going to take our frosting,

put a little bit on top.

This we just want to get out to the edges.

You want a nice, smooth, even coating.

Not super thick,

we've got a lot of chocolatey goodness in there.

Put a pretty big dollop of frosting on the side

so there's quite a bit to fill in, in terms of the gaps.

The first time I made this cake

I actually hid for a little bit

because I was worried that

Claire was gonna judge my frosting abilities,

but the nice thing is

we're actually putting a coat of crumbs around it

so it's going to hide all the little mistakes that you make.

Now I'm going to use the rest of the frosting

and just even out the top of the cake.

And you can see where there's a little lip of frosting

just pull it in

and use that to help you smooth it out.

Now the fun part,

or I really like this part.

All you have to do is just go around

and press into the cake.

And you want to go all the way up the sides of the cake.

Just gently press, you don't have to go crazy.

All right.

So now I'm just gonna put this in the refrigerator

and let it chill

and then I will brush off all the crumbs,

take out the paper and we will cut it.

All right, it's been chilling.

I dusted off the crumbs

and now it's time to cut.

I've got some very hot water,

very sharp knife.

I am going to heat up the knife.

This is going to give me a nice, clean cut.

Not necessary but, you know,

it's a cold cake,

there's lot of really squishy chocolate layers

that are gonna melt.

And this is just gonna help go through.

Here I go.

Aw, yes, yes.

[Gaby] That's Sugarman size.

Yes, exactly.

Is Emily coming or is it just me and you?

I don't know.

Should we share one?

Hi, Emily.

I guess she doesn't care for your cake.

Oh, Emily, here's some cake.

Thank you. Forks.

I brought my Michael B. Jordan mug.

Oh, nice.

Oh wow, this is a big bite.

[Gaby and Emily moaning]

Oh my god, this is so good.

Yeah, I'm, like, V happy.

Wow, it's so chocolatey.

Yeah, I want a pool of this ganache situation.

I mean, we may have a couple of extra bowls over there.

You can just take 'em over to your desk,

hang out.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Rick.

Yeah, any time.

I'm gonna get some coffee.

Notice me Michael B. Jordan.

[Rick laughing]

How could he not?

Gaze into my layers.

This is an amazing cake.

Even if you don't do the pudding and the frosting

it's actually just a really good, easy,

rich chocolate cake.

So throw on a chocolate buttercream, boom.

But you should make this cake.

So Morocco was around when I developed this cake

and we have strong opinions about chocolate cake, yeah.

Psychotically opinionated.

Psychotically, yeah.

Moistness.

Not super sweet. [creepy music]

The crumb, like, really open, dark.

And don't try too hard, you know?

[Rick] No, no.

Like don't try to make it something it's not.

Like, it's not, it's not like a torte,

it's not a flat, you know, it's not like fudgey,

it's not a brownie. No.

It's chocolate cake.

Also it's a good vehicle for frosting

and, in this case, pudding.

[Chris] That's where we differ.

I'd be happy just with a cake,

I don't even need the frosting.

Boring AF.