I, a Former Pastry Cook, Tried Ina Garten’s Most Popular Cake Recipe and Now I’m Self-Actualized

If you count yourself a fan of Ina Garten, you’re probably familiar with at least a handful of her most talked-about recipes. There’s the chicken Marbella , the giant cosmopolitan , the engagement chicken . But reader, have you heard of Beatty’s Chocolate Cake?

While I can’t give quantitative evidence, this mythical cake is arguably one of Ms. Garten’s most popular baking recipes. It pops up again and again on lists of the Barefoot Contessa’s most beloved dishes. So naturally I, a former pastry chef and food editor, had to try it for myself. Here’s my tell-all review.

This Is the Most Important Thing to Do Before You Start Baking...Anything

The Recipe

The recipe for Beatty’s Chocolate Cake , while available on the Barefoot Contessa’s website, originally comes from her fifth cookbook, Barefoot Contessa at Home . It’s described as an “intermediate” difficulty level. Right off the bat, I didn’t have the two 8-inch cake pans required to make the classic layer cake. I didn’t even have one , so I thought I’d opt for the cupcake option. This is where I think I went astray.

Making the Cake

Katherine Gillen

This is a pretty standard cake recipe—you mix the dry ingredients, mix the wet, combine them with an electric mixer and bake. But Ina loves to throw in a little “Ina” twist, so there’s a full cup of freshly brewed coffee in the batter (as a way to boost the cocoa flavor). It was runny, so I thought I’d pour it into the cupcake molds with a liquid measuring cup. Then I realized I’d have to do that 24 times…so I whipped out my 9-inch cake pan after 12 cupcakes and prayed to the cake gods that it would turn out. (At this point, I knew I wasn’t serving this cake to anyone but myself…) It did—and I think you could use two 9-inch pans with success too.

One thing about Ina that has always puzzled me is that she loooves to call for extra-large eggs in her baking recipes. Why? Why, Ina?! Listen to me: You don’t need them. Now write down this egg size rule : In a recipe that calls for one or two eggs, you can use large and extra-large interchangeably. You’re welcome.

Katherine Gillen

I thought everything was going fine until I took the cupcakes out of the oven. They looked great, but anywhere the tops were touching the pan, they were hopelessly stuck—yes, even with paper liners. Don’t make my mistake; grease your cake pans (and don’t fill your cupcakes more than two-thirds full).

Katherine Gillen

Finally, it was frosting time. If you know anything about the various types of frosting , this was like a chocolate-flavored American buttercream with, as Ina would say, “the volume turned up.” Yes, it contains instant coffee powder to enhance the chocolate and temper the sweetness, but it also (interestingly) contains a single raw egg yolk. Not for nothing, Ina doesn’t add extra steps to her recipes if she doesn’t think they’re essential. And while I’m sure you could leave out this small detail (for folks who can’t consume raw eggs), the effect is a noticeably richer, silkier frosting than a typical butter and confectioners’ sugar situation. And unlike most American buttercreams that form a hard crust as they sit out, this stayed soft and fluffy all afternoon as I waited for the cakes to cool.

The Final Verdict

Between the cake pans, the sticking and the eggs, I was ready to dislike Beatty’s Chocolate Cake out of spite. But here’s what I wrote down when I went to taste it:

• The opposite of dry
• Rich but not too sweet
• OK fine, this is actually pretty good and it’s my fault I had hiccups along the way

So, there you have it. I didn’t just bake a good chocolate cake! I learned some things about myself: I love a baking shortcut, I don’t love when my shortcuts cause poor outcomes and I would never admit that those two traits are at odds. So I’m basically self-actualized now. Thanks, Ina!

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