photo via Tea and Wheaten Bread

No (totally unofficial but still awesome) Dessert Week deserves the name without featuring the best of all desserts, the most delicious of the delicious: the chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is so close to being the platonic ideal of all sweet things that I am tempted to say that even a chocolate cake from the grocery store, even an Entenmann's chocolate cake with the weird machine-made swirling on top, is better than the best any-other-dessert, but that could just be my mania talking. The kind of mania that makes me think that someday I want to own a big, gorgeous and perfect chocolate cake into which I will dive, headfirst, and live forever and ever, rent-free, fat and happy.

Until that day of day arrives and a giant cake is wheeled up in front of my house and I am snapping on my snorkel, I can make tiny cakes into which I can just put my face and breathe in and out. Tea and Wheaten Bread knows how to make a chocolate cake with hazelnuts so pretty you are reluctant to cut into it. For 30 seconds. Noble Pig wants you to add beer to your chocolate cake, and I think that deserves a hell yes. Gourmet Girl says mayonnaise, and that makes me a little suspicious, and yet--it's chocolate cake. Wesaturtle added an entire orange. I just like to add chocolate. A lot of chocolate. And then, more chocolate. This recipe from Epicurious makes the most perfectly dense, rich and moist chocolate cake I have ever sampled--one of those cakes that are so ridiculously, impossibly thick and chocolate-y that you can only have one slice. An hour. Mine always comes out lumpy and tragic, as if someone left it out in the rain, and yet? Chocolate cake.