Chocolate Cake Recipes

This rich and decadent spiced pumpkin cake is just the thing to serve for an autumn celebration, Thanksgiving or otherwise. Chocolate chips and chopped pecans are added to the pumpkin batter for extra sweetness and a bit of welcome crunch. For those who like to plan ahead, it can be made and frozen – iced and all. Just put the entire finished cake on a plate or a baking sheet, unwrapped, and freeze it overnight until it is hard. Then it can be wrapped without damage to the frosting, and returned to the freezer. Layers can also be wrapped well and stored, to be iced later.

A twist on the classic Thanksgiving dessert, this no-bake chocolate pecan pie features three layers of chocolate goodness and a very generous amount of pecan pie filling. Everyone will rave about it! The thing about Thanksgiving desserts is that they need to be made in advance. You can’t bake your pumpkin pie or the cheesecake on Thanksgiving morning. There’s not enough room in the oven! Unless you have 3 or 4 ovens and in that case, I’m not talking with you anymore. The beauty of this no-bake chocolate pecan pie is that it requires no oven space. And it can be made up to a week or two in advance! How amazing is that? One less thing to stress about.

Here is a homemade take on the Hostess Cupcake, the sweet, well-preserved treat that was lost, for a while, to the wilds of bankruptcy. They take a little time to make but are well worth it. (Don’t skimp on the Marshmallow Fluff!) Wrapping the finished items individually in cellophane allow eaters to experience the twinkly crinkle of childhood afternoons spent carefully removing the chocolate frosting from the cupcake’s top. But these are decidedly not the original. Whatever you do, make sure they’re stored in something airtight. They will dry out quickly.

The year: 1983. The place: Williamsburg, Va., where representatives from across the globe — and “some of the biggest and brightest names on the American culinary scene” — gathered. The Times’s own Craig Claiborne planned the menus; Paul Prudhomme, Wolfgang Puck and Zarela Martinez cooked; and Maida Heatter provided dessert. Among her offerings were these, chocolate cheesecake brownies, “a formidable new creation” for the time. Here, a layer of pecan-studded brownie meets a sheet of chocolate cheesecake. Make them for a group — or for yourself to eat over time. They freeze well, and can just as well be served frozen.

Do you ever have those moments when you want something sweet, but you don’t want to make a huge batch?  Maybe it’s just you and one other person living in your home and you really don’t have a need for a lot of desserts.  These Molten Chocolate Lava Cakes are the perfect small batch dessert!  These lava cakes are incredibly easy to make and ready in less than 30 minutes. Dig into a rich and delicious Chocolate Molten Lava Cake and cue the ooey-gooey center. This Molten Lava Cake recipe makes 8 servings to savor.

I baked about 100 dozen cookies for the holidays and these were everyone's favorite!! ENJOY!!!

It is hard to believe in this day and age – when salted caramel ice cream is almost as ubiquitous as vanilla – that desserts in which salt plays a starring role was once a newfangled concept. Layers of silky caramel and dark chocolate ganache topped with a sprinkling of crunchy, snow-white fleur de sel make this an unforgettable combination of flavors and textures.

A couple of years ago, my mother taught me to make her dense but moist chocolate birthday cake. She calls it 'dump-it cake' because you mix all of the ingredients in a pot over medium heat, then dumps the batter into a cake pan to bake. For the icing, you melt Nestlé's semisweet-chocolate chips and swirl them together with sour cream. It sounds as if it's straight from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, but it tastes as if it's straight from Payard. Everyone loves it.

Right or wrong I’ve always viewed the cupcake as a frosting transport system, and if you’re not a huge frosting fan (I’m not), then I figured, why bother? Then I remembered a friend had mentioned a recipe from Maida Heatter that was, in her words, a “grown-up cupcake.” I figured perhaps I owed the miniature confections a chance. Ms. Heatter’s recipe, modestly entitled, “Chocolate Cupcakes” from her 1974 book “Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts,” produced a rich, moist crumb that relies on cocoa powder for its deep chocolatey flavor. But it’s her topping of semi-sweet chocolate ganache that separates these cupcakes from the crowd. No buttercream, no food coloring, and no diabetic shock after consumption. Just a really nice chocolate cake that’s a bit on the small side.

Minty Chocolate Cake Bites! Incredibly easy and perfect for the holidays. It’s made with ZERO artificial colors or flavors and ZERO high fructose corn syrup. Boom. Fudgy, sparkly, minty if you want them to be, perfectly stored in the fridge for an after-dinner bite-sized dessert or five…

I took my favorite layer cake recipe (the one we used for my birthday cake a few months back) and divided it into 3 bowls and then flavored each bowl to be reminiscent of slutty brownies. That means one cake layer tastes like chocolate chip cookies, one with chocolate cookies and one like a brownie. It’s basically heaven on earth and it’s seriously a show stopper.

This Mint Chocolate Chip Layer Cake is a mint lover's dream come true! Chocolate cake layers with chunks of Andes mints and mini chocolate chips, plus a silky-smooth mint buttercream with lots of flecks of mint chocolate chips. In this season of Thin Mints and green everything, I think you need this Mint Chocolate Chip Layer Cake in your life. It'll make you say “Thin Mint who?”