My Chocolate Cake Taste Test (And Why I Love My Coworkers!)
Decorating By pottedmeatchunks Updated 31 Jul 2007 , 4:35pm by FromScratch
today I brought in a 3 layer chocolate cake to the office for monthly bdays and i had each layer a different type of chocolate cake, all iced in chocolate bc. the bottom layer was darn good chocolate cake (made from betty crocker mix, no chocolate chips, milk subbed for water), the middle layer was Hershey's "perfectly chocolate" cake (identical to the Dark Chocolate Cake recipe on this site), and the top layer was the chocolate version of the WASC cake (made with a duncan hines mix)
as for appearance, i didnt like the way the chocolate wasc cake turned out...it was very light colored. the other 2 were a darker more chocolately looking shade. As for the taste test results:
Darn Good Chocolate Cake: 5 votes
Hershey's/Dark Chocolate Cake: 0 votes
Chocolate WASC: 1 vote
ok not a lot of votes but I'm very pleased with the results...the easiest recipe to make was the winner!! and to be fair to hershey's, everyone that voted for darn good chocolate cake said hershey's was 2nd best. and to be fair to WASC, everyone said ALL 3 were good!
I'm VERY glad to have read this, as I have to make a chocolate cake for a birthday next week, and I have yet to find one that I have really liked. I will have to try the DGCC recipe now! 
Thanks so much for sharing this.
I just made the Hershey's "Especially Dark" Chocolate cake as cupcakes and the flavor is awesome - very, very dark chocolate. It is made using the Hershey's Dutch Processed Special Dark Cocoa. In my pics, you can see how dark the cupcakes are - they are almost black!!
I just made them to try the recipe and figured I could take them to work - they don't care how they look as long as they taste good. 
well my coworkers are easy to please...until I got here they were eating the $5 rack of cakes from the grocery store for office bdays (you know the ones...2-3 days old and kinda funky) so whatever I feed them they think is stupendous!
i just wish i had a REALLY good from scratch recipe to try, because i know that others have done similar taste tests with chocolate cake and the darn good chocolate cake always loses, haha!
I just made the Hershey's "Especially Dark" Chocolate cake as cupcakes and the flavor is awesome - very, very dark chocolate. It is made using the Hershey's Dutch Processed Special Dark Cocoa. In my pics, you can see how dark the cupcakes are - they are almost black!!
I just made them to try the recipe and figured I could take them to work - they don't care how they look as long as they taste good.
I tried this recipe and didn't care much for it the first time. I will try it a secon time to see if my feelings change since I like giving second chances...ha.
Thanks for that feedback. I need to make a chocolate cake for a tiered wedding cake and wasn't sure which of the two to do. the Darned Good or the WASC chocolate version. I was going to go with the WASC, until today, but may I ask, which of those 2 had the best height on them.
I love the Hersheys recipe but it doesn't rise as high as I would like. Thanks
I love the Hershey Chocolate cake. I've made it a couple times now and it's delicious. I just find that it's a hard cake to keep together. It doesn't come out of the pan in one piece. When frosting it you get alot of crumbs but it's very moist and yummy so I just put up with it.
Is there a link to the Darn Good Chocoloate cake recipe? Anything with a name like that has to be .... Darn Good!
Shazzicakes, just go to recipes at the top of the page, then to cake mixes or chocolate cakes. You should be able to bring it up.
This is a good scratch chocolate cake.. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/101275 as is this one.. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/107105. The first one is more of a traditional chocolate cake and the second one is a rich chocolate stout cake that is really good. My kids love it, but you can taste the stout in it a little and some kids may not. It is rich and moist though.
Thanks for that feedback. I need to make a chocolate cake for a tiered wedding cake and wasn't sure which of the two to do. the Darned Good or the WASC chocolate version. I was going to go with the WASC, until today, but may I ask, which of those 2 had the best height on them.
I love the Hersheys recipe but it doesn't rise as high as I would like. Thanks
WASC definitely has the best height. i think the pudding in the darn good chocolate cake makes it not rise quite as high and makes it more dense as well.
the Hersheys cake I made I had a problem where the cake rose WAY too fast in the middle and I had a huge cracked peak with little to no height on the edges. that was probably a baking issue on my part, but I had to tort the thing quite a bit all around.
thank you jkalman for the recipes!! I think you posted a from scratch carrot cake recipe earlier that was good for sculpting and I have that on my list of things to try next week!
Yup.. that was me.. Do let me know if you like it.
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