- Joined
- Jan 26, 2003
- Messages
- 22,161
AGBF said:I saw that coffee is an ingredient in ksinger's chocolate pound cake! The same coffee that we discussed enhancing chocolate cakes earlier in the thread. I really had never heard of this before we got into it in this thread. Did anyone else here who bakes hear of it as a universal principle?
The Internet can be a wonderful tool. It took me a very short time to find that our suspicions were founded: coffee is supposed to enhance the flavor of chocolate! Below is an excerpt from the Baking Bites website.
"When you bake enough chocolate cakes, or simply look at enough chocolate cake recipes, you’ll notice a trend: many of them include coffee or instant coffee as an ingredient. This isn’t because most people are looking for a mocha-flavored cake. Rather, coffee is commonly included because it is a great way to enhance the flavor of cocoa powder, resulting in a more chocolaty cake – not a coffee-flavored one.
Cocoa powder is a bit bitter on its own, with hints of fruit and spice that are detectable when you get a good-quality cocoa. Coffee has these same flavor elements, and a small amount of coffee in a cake batter – whether you’re using 1 cup of coffee or 1 tbsp instant coffee – will help these cocoa flavors stand out even more than they would on their own. The milk, sugar, eggs and so forth that you add into a cake just helps all that cocoa taste good, not necessarily more chocolaty! You would have to add quite a bit of coffee (or not have much cocoa at all) to get more of a coffee flavor than a cocoa one; chocolate is generally more dominant in a baked good than coffee is.
(snip of paragraph)"
Deb/AGBF
