The Spicy Secret Ingredients That Take Your Chocolate Cake Up A Notch

As tasty as it can be, chocolate cake isn't always the most exciting dessert unless you can sneak in a few secret ingredients. Certainly, a rich chocolate cake is a delicious thing, yet it's also very one note. Unlike lighter vanilla or yellow cakes that can blend with a lot of fun and creative additions, chocolate tends to overpower a lot of other flavors. Searching for a list of chocolate cake recipes, you'll find most of your choices are over just how deep the chocolate flavor is (death by chocolate) or its texture (chocolate mousse). Well, it doesn't need to be this way. Chocolate is always going to demand the spotlight in a cake, but you can still surprise people with a canny use of spices.

Although spicy in cake can mean hot, it can also mean hitting people with a pungent smack of aromatic spices. Think of warming spices or anything you'd want in Christmas cookies or a hot tea on a cold winter's day — cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, or any combination of the above. All of these spices are complementary to chocolate and have enough punch to stand out in a chocolate cake. They are the type of additions that people will immediately notice when they take a bite, but still have to ask you: What did you put in this?

These kinds of additions push chocolate cake over the top by adding the number one thing it is usually missing: complexity. You still want your chocolate cake to taste like chocolate, but just like in a rich sauce, these spices will add extra layers of flavor under the chocolate that will unfold more as you eat. It's the kind of subtle surprise that keeps people coming back for more.

And of course, these common spices aren't the only choices. Anyone who's ever had a Mexican hot chocolate knows that spicy chili flavors used in moderation can be a wonderful addition to chocolate recipes. This could be something as simple as a few pinches of cayenne, but there are also other dried chile powders like ancho or pasilla that are less hot and more complex. They can be sweet, fruity, smokey, and spicy all at the same time, adding a lot of depth that can either complement chocolate's own tasting notes or balance it out. While chiles are wonderfully flavorful additions by themselves, they also pair well with the other warm spices mentioned and can be added in small amounts to existing spice mixes if you don't want to go all in right away. Chocolate cake may not be the expansive blank palate that some other cakes are, but with a few secret, spicy ingredients, you can still turn it into something special.