This Is Ina Garten’s Favorite Chocolate Cake Recipe. Now It’s Mine, Too

When we ran Ina Garten’s double-chocolate layer cake recipe in 2007, she declared it “the most fabulous chocolate cake that I’ve ever made.” If Garten, a prolific maker of cakes, said this was the best, I was inclined to believe it was the best. Just to be safe, this week I decided to finally make it and find out for myself.

I’m not a confident baker, so what drew me to the recipe was its straightforward instructions and reasonable ingredient list, containing mostly things I already had on hand. Plus, Garten isn’t the only one who has sung this cake’s praises. My friend and colleague Sarah Crowder, former F&W visuals editor, had told me for years this was her go-to chocolate cake recipe — in part thanks to its secret ingredient, coffee, which appears in the frosting and the batter.

“The texture is perfect — moist without being too dense — and the coffee deepens the chocolate flavor,” she told me. “I now keep instant coffee on hand exclusively for chocolate baked goods.”

Instant coffee is included in the creamy, lush frosting, and a cup of hot coffee goes into the cake batter, too. When I made the cake myself, after I poured the coffee into the batter the mixture was much more liquid than I expected, but I tasted a small, delicious spoonful and resolved to trust the process.

I baked the cake in two heart-shaped pans, rather than the two 8- x 2-inch round cake pans the recipe calls for, and that’s where I went “wrong.” (When I sent Sarah a photo of how my cake turned out, she called me, laughing to the point of tears.) I put wrong in quotes because, while the result looked completely chaotic (the heart pans were slightly too small, which messed with the bake times), it was the most delicious, moist, flavorful cake I’ve ever eaten in my life.

So if ugly-looking cakes are wrong, I don’t want to be right.