How to cook the perfect chocolate cake

A few weeks ago, I made an ever-so secret birthday cake for one of my housemates. Chocolate, naturally: the cast iron crowd-pleaser of cakes. Searching for the perfect recipe, I was surprised to discover that somehow, in nearly three years, we hadn't covered the subject in this column: a shameful omission indeed, so I turned to Twitter for advice.

Recommendations came flooding in, but one unwieldy name kept popping up, that of Scharffen Berger. The recipe in question, taken from that American firm's Essence of Chocolate book, is (according to reports) a very similar beast to the almost equally popular Easy Chocolate Cake on the BBC website. It was a shoo-in.
The birthday girl loved her surprise, and indeed "that cake" hit many of the necessary buttons: moist, dark and crumbly, it was still going strong a couple of days later. But for me at least, it lacked something. And that something was chocolate: it just didn't pack the cocoa punch I was looking for, a common complaint with chocolate cakes that look the part but don't quite deliver.

Flavour is rarely a problem with a dessert-style chocolate cake of course, a creation so rich and gooey it generally has to be eaten in teeny tiny slivers with a fork. But I'm looking for a chocolate cake in the truest sense of the word. Not a torte, not a mousse, not a pudding, but a cake which actually tastes of chocolate. And that, surely, isn't beyond the bounds of possibility.