Velvet Devil's Food Layer Cake with Coffee-Part 1

Devil’s food gets its reputation from one thing: bloomed cocoa. Pouring boiling water over cocoa powder and instant coffee wakes up the chocolate and pulls out bitter, roasty notes you never get from just stirring cocoa into the batter dry.

The coffee is doing double duty here. You don’t taste it as coffee, but it sharpens the chocolate so the cake reads darker and more grown-up than most layer cakes.

Creaming the butter and sugar until almost white is a full five-minute job. Don’t short it. That long beat is what gives devil’s food its plush, velvety crumb instead of a dense one.

This is Part 1 of the recipe, covering the cake layers and buttercream setup. The finishing assembly continues in Part 2.

Pro Tips

• Use room-temperature eggs; cold eggs will seize the butter and break the emulsion.
• Line pans with parchment and grease the paper too. Cakes this tender cling to bare metal.
• Sift cocoa before blooming to eliminate lumps you can’t whisk out later.
• For sharper chocolate punch, use Dutch-process cocoa and pair with baking soda as written.

Variations

• Substitute espresso for the instant coffee for a more pronounced mocha tone.
• Add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the flour for Mexican-chocolate warmth.
• Swap the coffee buttercream for whipped chocolate ganache between layers.