Chocolate is a must-have for Valentine’s Day, but it needn’t be fussy. Instead of melting bars for chocolate-covered strawberries or spending money on store-bought bon bons, give your valentine an intensely rich double chocolate loaf cake with a plush, velvety crumb.
Inspiration for this cake came to us by way of Claire Ptak of Violet Cakes, a bakery-café in East London. In this recipe from our cookbook, “ Milk Street Bakes,” we achieve a complex chocolatiness using a generous amount of bittersweet chocolate and unsweetened cocoa powder. Any type of bittersweet chocolate will work, but for best results use one that’s tasty enough to eat out of hand and contains about 70% cocoa solids.
